


This Enchanted Place

by layersofsilence



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Captain America Big Bang 2018, Fantasy - Medieval, M/M, Magic, POV Alternating, Political Intrigue, Swan!Bucky, kind of, swan lake AU, temporarily, very slight body dysphoria - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-31
Updated: 2018-10-31
Packaged: 2019-08-11 11:11:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 41,903
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16474445
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/layersofsilence/pseuds/layersofsilence
Summary: When the chill of winter starts to sneak through the forest, all the swans on the lake prepare to migrate away from the castle and the royal lake and into warmer climes.All the swans, that is, except one, who cannot bring himself to leave for reasons unknown even to him. Frustrated with himself, he prepares to spend a long, cold winter on his own - but then he meets Crown Prince Steven Rogers and begins to suspect there is more to him than his own shape lets on.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> SO many thanks to the wonderful [buckysnowangel](https://buckysnowangel.tumblr.com/) for the absolutely gorgeous art, and for putting up with my temperamental and terrible writing speed - please check out their art post [here](https://buckysnowangel.tumblr.com/post/179621975021/full-artwork-for-my-cap-big-bang) and show it some love! ❤
> 
> many thanks also and as always to my slack crew for putting up with my whining and the amazing mods of this event - you guys are wonderful ❤

  


The swan’s mind is made up: winter is a coward of a season. It refuses to come out and make itself known in the forest, chooses instead to creep amongst the trees during the night, to seep its cold and chill through the leaves in increments so small that they are overlooked until it is almost too late: until they have made such a slow and steady difference that one day the swan looks up to see that the branches of even the greenest trees around the lake have grown sparse and bare, and his companions are preparing to fly away.

He had only escaped the stone walls of the castle recently, has not even been with this little group of swans on the lake for a full season, but they have been kind to him ever since he’d scared them all half out of their mind when he’d crashed into their lake in the middle of the night. Kind enough that they have assumed he will accompany them in their migration, even accompany him with gentle nudges and quiet noises towards the far end of the lake where he can work up a good speed to take off.

The sensible thing to do - the _instinctive_ thing to do - is to go with them. He can feel the imminent change in the air, has himself observed the cooling of the weather, and his instincts urge him to go somewhere for the summer where there will be plenty to eat and his feathers will be touched by the warm sun every day. The image of it is soft and vague in his mind, and tempting for all that. But -

But he’s felt this same instinct to fly once before, far and fast and away - when he’d escaped the castle by squashing himself unceremoniously out of a window and launching himself into endless air without a single thought in his mind save for _escape_ , when he’d left behind him the danger-pain-fear that came with being caged in those stone walls, with being poked and prodded by strange figures with vague faces. And even that, against all of that, as he’d wheeled desperately and clumsily through the air searching for a direction of escape, something stronger inside him had reared its head inside him and begged to stay, and he’d been powerless to resist.

The closer he gets to leaving, the more he feels that same old emotion. When he swims to the far end of the lake, when he tries to let himself be convinced by the other swans around him, that old strange monster raises its head again and says _no_.

It does not take long for the other swans to realise that he is not moving to join them, that he is, in fact, doing nothing but sitting and watching them wistfully, wings still folded by his sides. They think he is immensely silly for not making a move to join them and are not shy to tell him so.

They’re entirely right in their exasperation - he knows it, and they certainly know it - and yet they are still good enough to try and convince him to go with them: they purposefully show him the rapidly dwindling greens that would make up his diet if he stays, they herd him to the far end of the lake, they gesture expansively at the frost on the ground. One pen rears up to smack him with strong wings, and all he can do is bow his head and accept because he deserves it; there’s a reason that swans feel such an urge to migrate in winter. Even if he doesn’t remember any previous migrations, doesn’t know if he’s ever migrated before, his instincts alone are enough to tell him he should be going.

Their last-ditch effort is a series of demonstrations: they race across the water, feet pumping, wings flapping, necks outstretched and shapely, and then they let themselves lose whatever height they have gained and swim back to the swan, honking and nudging at him to try it for himself, much to the annoyance of the smaller waterfowl on the lake.

Most of the morning has disappeared when the swan finally convinces them that he means to stay, that he is a stubborn, hopeless case. They give up and leave him, but even as they leave they are trying to convince him, making a showy demonstration out of their takeoff with the slow, careful movements. He honks at them as they pass, an apology and a farewell, and doesn’t move.

The sun slants across their pale gleaming feathers as they leave him. The light of it turns them them yellow and golden for a few brief, breathless moments before they transform, as if by magic, into sleek, straight silhouettes. The swan watches them leave until they are nothing but specks in the sky, and then watches more, until there isn’t so much as a hint that they were ever there, and the swan is well and truly alone.

The pale water below him is something of a disappointing sight to return his gaze to. The greens below the surface seem to taunt him, pale and limp even before they’re pulled out to eat. He does not remember living through a winter but he knows, somehow, what is going to happen: the weather is going to grow colder, the planets thinner, and he is going to get hungrier. The swan resigns himself to a long winter, cursing himself all the while for the desperate _no no nonono_ that rings through his entire body when he dares to so much as consider leaving the lake, when he thinks about how he could probably catch up to the rest of the swans if he left now, how he’d probably be welcomed by them.

He does not remember living through a winter in the same way that he does not remember anything before his escape from the castle, does not remember growing in his white feathers or sitting on his mother’s back or his childhood nest - but something about the way the forest changes is familiar, is exactly in line with how he’d thought it would go. The falling temperature, the brittle frost on the ground in the morning, the way that all the vegetation seems to dry out so that every noise carries through the clear winter air: it all seems close to his mind. Like it’s happened before, and the memory may be just out of reach but the sensation is not.

The lake is lonely without the other swans nearby. When he is alone time tries to stretch out, monotonous and sticky like honey. The swan refuses to let himself fall into an apathetic wait for winter to end, resists it as best he can, first by cataloguing the greens that remain in the lake - enough for now, if limp and unhealthy - and then, half out of necessity and half out of morbid curiosity, doing the same for the forest.

It means a lot of walking through vegetation, but it’s worth it to find the few scant spots where he can graze before winter renders the forest truly barren. The area is, at least, easily navigable: the lake is the centre of the forest, and nature extends outwards until it reaches the castle grounds or a tall spiked fence, depending on the direction the swan has chosen. The swan very rarely chooses to go towards the palace.

Even as winter truly settles in and makes the forest its own, there are other animals that stay: he bumps into thin, jumpy deer that flee as soon as they hear him coming, and flees himself from the boar in the secluded northern area of the keep, because he needs such a long stretch of open space to gain any useful height in the air that even the slightest hint of being chased through the forest is a risk.

He’s mapped out most of the west side of the forest when, one particularly cold and unhappy morning as the sun hides behind thick clouds, the swan is woken up by the sound of a large body moving carelessly through the undergrowth. He flees to huddle behind the nearest tree trunk, but even that simplest of precautionary measures turns out to be unnecessary when the reason for the noise makes itself clear: there is a human in the forest, and he is upset to the point of tears.

The man stumbles through the treeline, steps careless, and immediately stops to wipe his face, his movements rough and jerky as though he is angry at himself. His attention is greatly impaired, as is his vision, and there is no possible way that he would notice if the swan took the opportunity to sneak away.

The swan stays, instead. And more than that: he finds himself curving his neck around the tree to stare like he can’t take his eyes off the man, and perhaps he can’t. The man is brighter than anything the swan has ever seen, golden hair and sky-blue eyes and sunshine-warm skin. It seems like a strange kind of injustice, that he is still so bright when he is so clearly sad.

Like a puppet with his strings cut, the man drops to the ground at the edge of the lake. His face is uncovered, now, and it’s vaguely, insistently familiar, enough that the swan finds himself jerking forwards before he catches himself. It’s idiotic and he knows it, but he can’t find it in himself to move away.

The more the swan looks at the man, the more familiar he seems, tugging at some unknown corner of the swan’s mind. He swears that he could see this man with a thousand different expressions, in a thousand different places, and it would all be familiar to him.

The man is so beautiful and so familiar and so sad, and there’s something about him which draws the swan inexorably closer to him - somehow, it’s not surprising when he realises that he wants nothing more than to comfort the man. No sooner has he come to this realisation than he finds himself coming out of his hiding place, in the water and halfway to his goal before he can so much as blink. He doesn’t want to see tears on this man’s face. Not this person of all people, he thinks, and doesn’t quite know why.

The swan has never considered himself particularly vain - at least not like some of this companions, who could spend hours and days preening at their feathers - but when the man doesn’t notice him as he draws closer he finds that it stings, just a little. The man has his legs drawn up and his face buried in his knees, and he doesn’t so much as stir as the swan swims close and steps closer. His back rises and falls in a rhythm that is carefully and pointedly regular, but wetness still seeps slowly through the fabric beneath his eyes.

Abruptly, the mystery of why the swan cares so much no longer matters; he simply wants the man to smile.

It’s simple enough for the swan to step towards the curled-up figure in front of him, to bump his beak very gently against the bone of the leg closes to him. It’s only then that the man lifts his head in confusion, and the swan seizes the opportunity to lay his head directly into the slightly damp groove between the man’s knees to prevent him from putting his head back down.

“I - _what_?” the man asks. Confusion is plain in his tone, his eyes, even the slight tightening of his posture. Confusion is better than sadness, but only slightly. And it’s still not what the swan wants. He honks softly. The man looks at him warily and starts attempting to shuffle backwards. The swan follows, and honks again, as gentle as he can be. “What?” the man asks again, still confused, but now he stills, stops trying to escape. Starts to relax.

The swan honks again, soft and pleased. The man stares at him, and the swan refuses to look away. It’s the man, then, who lets out a weak, unintelligible half-noise and breaks the stare. There are a few lonely tears on his cheeks, plainly visible even in the weak winter light.

The swan honks again, once, even quieter. Those tears drawn something aching out of him. He hadn’t known he could feel such a thing.

“I mean - thanks, I guess,” the man says, with a laugh that is more surprised than happy as he reaches out. The swan’s instincts choose now to make a reappearance at the movement, start trying to shout for him to hiss as intimidatingly as he can, to spread his wings out wide and smack the man with them. A far bigger part of him just looks at those big hands, though, and the gentle way they move, and says _yes, please_ instead, so strongly that any other instinct he might have is drowned out.

Those hands are warm on his neck. The man takes care to stroke very gently, smoothing down the soft feathers there. He’s exactly as soft and sweet as the swan thought he would be.

“The rest of the swans migrated away a week ago, I saw them,” the man says, slow and thoughtful. “Why didn’t you go with them, hm?” The swan doesn’t answer, doesn’t want to answer, only presses his neck further into those big gentle hands. “Are you tame?” the man asks, and something warm filters through his voice as he continues slowly forgetting his sadness, “Yeah, look at you, you must be.”

The warmth in his voice seems to draw out a corresponding warmth in the swan. The weather is chilly and he hasn’t the slightest idea of what to do with the feeling, but there it is, flowing through his veins anyway. His tail feathers wiggle happily, entirely without his permission; he’d be annoyed if he didn’t feel so purely buoyant. The man’s sadness cracks, and he grins down at the swan, which just - it makes the whole situation _worse_. The swan thinks he might just float off the ground.

He snaps playfully at the man’s hand, gentle in the same way the man had been gentle. It provokes a _laugh_ , and that makes the swan even warmer, like he has spent too long in the sun without feathers. It should be dreadfully uncomfortable, but it isn’t at all.

“ _Steven_!” an annoyed voice shouts in the distance. “ _Steve_! Your _Highness_!” The swan’s man jumps guiltily at the yells, twisting around although nobody is visible through the trees.

The swan has a name for his human, now. This satisfies him greatly until Steve starts to get up, and he realises that the shouts are calling Steve away. He honks in protest and clamps his beak around the trousers in front of him.

It makes Steve laugh again, even as he moves away, and the swan digs his feet in and glares harder. “I have to go!” Steve protests, a grin tugging at the corner of his lips. “I’ll come back,” he negotiates. “Tomorrow. I promise.”

The swan shouldn’t, by rights, know what a promise is, but he understands what Steve’s saying all the same, and knows that Steve is not a man who would break his word. Reluctantly, he lets go of the fabric in his beak.

“Thank you,” Steve says as he reclaims his clothes, a laugh lingering in his eyes, and he leaves the way that he came, much more quietly. The swan stands on the bank of the lake and watches him as he leaves. Hoping, maybe, for a final look, a final turn, and that hope is fulfilled when Steve reaches the edge of the trees, and he turns and smiles and gives a little wave. The swan raises an awkward wing to try and wave back, and is rewarded with a wider smile, a brighter gaze, and then he stands and watches until Steve is entirely out of sight.

The swan only retreats back to the water of the lake when no sign of Steve is left in his field of vision except for the faint impression on the grass of the lakeshore. Still, the day hasn’t been entirely terribly: he has a name for his human, and there is an insistent sense in his mind that he knows more than he thinks about Steve.

~*~

The day only goes downhill from there. The swan folds his head onto his back and squeezes his eyes tight shut and tries to remember what he’s forgotten and absolutely nothing happens. He sits like that for hours, forgets to eat, forgets nearly to sleep, and a night passes where oceans of information shiver along the edge of his memory, and every time he tries to focus it melts away like summer snow, like frost in the morning.

The most infuriating thing about it all is that the swan _does_ remember things, only they’re the exact things he doesn’t want in his mind: unpleasant dampness in the air, the echoing of every pained sound he made between stone walls, the press of iron bars into his wings as he tried and failed to stretch them. How it’d felt to be held captive. In brief, quick moments, he thinks of gold hair and sky-blue eyes, flashes that are more likely than not the products of a wistful and overexerted imagination.

To add insult to injury, the morning dawns insufferably bright and clear. The swan sulks underneath expansively bare branches until midday, mostly occupying himself by spitefully refusing to continue coaxing his memory. Steve hadn’t said what time he was going to come, and the swan doesn’t want to run the risk of missing him.

It’s almost precisely afternoon when there’s a quiet, “Hey there,” from a fond familiar voice. The swan nearly startles as Steve steps towards the lake; he's come a long way from the noisy trampling of yesterday, it seems. Or, possibly, the swan had merely been alarmingly preoccupied. He pushes those thoughts away and honks his pleasure at Steve’s arrival.

“I brought watercress,” Steve says. His voice is absurdly hopeful, and he is indeed clutching a rather large handful of fairly bedraggled leaves in one hand. The swan stares. Steve looks down at it, and then at the swan, and his chest expands and contracts on a sigh. “I’ll bring more next time.”

The swan takes the greens anyway, delicate in his handling of them even if they will barely make a small meal. It’s enough that Steve had cared, that Steve had thought of him, that Steve had taken the trouble to seek out a handful of leaves and brought them to him. Steve sits down as the swan begins to eat, his hands folded neatly on his lap.

It’s only after the pile has been neatly demolished that the swan realises: Steve had said _next time_. There’s going to be a next time - he’s going to see Steve again. The floaty blissfulness comes back, and only intensifies as the swan tucks himself in next to Steve, who seems entirely too adept at evoking that feeling in him.

“You’re beautiful, you know that?” Steve murmurs, proving the swan’s point, and brings a gentle hand down his back. The way the swan preens, in the wake of that comment, is not something he has ever done before, but it makes Steve smile, so he doesn’t think it can be a bad thing. “Yeah, you know,” he says, his voice going soft again. “Such a pretty swan.” His voice is warm and his hand is warm and the swan is warm and so, so content. He is happier than he can ever remember being, just from a few simple words.

He doesn’t know how long they sit together like that, because for once he is content to let time shift and flow around him, to let it stretch out like molasses. It is a few infinitely long moments later that the swan moves again, that he twists his head back to rest it on Steve’s shoulder.

“What’re you wanting now?” Steve asks, pulling back a little and smiling again. The swan stretches further upwards and taps his beak under Steve’s eye, tracing it downwards in the same path those lonely tears had taken.

Steve seems to understand what he’s getting at immediately, stiffening as he brings a hand up to cover his cheek, blinking down at the swan with wide eyes. “You -” Steve says, and then chokes off.

The swan cooes gently - something else he hasn’t done before. He makes the same gesture again, slightly more insistent, and Steve shakes his head in disbelief but talks anyway.

“The Queen...she was buried the day before yesterday. And,” he adds a few seconds later, with a sigh and a twist to his mouth that looks rueful, “my guard. My First Knight. He went missing...two months ago, maybe. A month and some.” The hand stroking the swan’s feathers trembles, just a little. His voice has gone tight; he sounds lonely and longing, and the swan wonders how long he’s wanted to talk to someone. Long enough to have him sounding like this, at least; long enough to have him spilling confessions to a bird. The swan cooes at him, as comforting as he knows how to be.

“It just...it made me miss him,” Steve says, more to himself now, methodically digging his fingers through the dirt. “He was good at - at just being with me. At helping me.”

Two months is a long time to be missing a best friend, the swan thinks, but he can’t vocalise it. He makes another soft noise instead, lays his head closer to Steve’s.

The noise must sound too much like sympathy, or perhaps Steve just needs to get it off his chest, but suddenly, abruptly, he says, “He’s alive.” The swan blinks at him, and Steve avoids his gaze but continues. “He is. I’d know if he wasn’t. We’re bound together. I’m just - I just worry about him, that’s all.” He brings his hand down the swan’s back again, deceptively gentle, and forces himself to relax as he huffs out all his breath. “He’s just a dumb jerk, going off with no word and getting me all worked up like this. You’re a better friend to me than he is, huh?”

The swan honks, but something about the words feels wrong to him.

“He’s got me so worried I’m talking to a bird, listen to me,” Steve says, his muffled voice on the edge of the laugh as he rubs his face. It is somewhat reassuring that he’s at least aware of what he’s doing. “He’s a _jerk_ ,” Steve says, but there is something fragile in his voice as he says it. It’s not hard to see that he’s more worried than he wants to admit, perhaps even to himself.

“I’m going to name you after him,” Steve says resolutely. “And when he comes back he’s going to find himself upstaged by a better James, yeah? A better Bucky.” He grins slightly at that, presses his face into the swan’s neck and repeats, “A better Bucky,” so that his breath ruffles at the soft feathers there.

Bucky thinks that ordinarily he would object to being named after someone else out of what appears to be mostly spite, except, well - the names ring through his mind, and they should be hard to internalise but they’re not. It’s startlingly easy for the swan to think of himself as James, to think of himself as Bucky. He can’t imagine having any other names, because these ones settle over his mind like well-worn clothing. It’s the first time he’s heard them, but perhaps it’s not the first time he’s been called by them.

Fuck, but he wishes he could remember what happened to him.

This turns out to be the beginning of a habit for Steve: he comes back the next day and the day after that and then the day after that, announcing himself with a quiet, “Hey, you,” and spending longer and longer amounts of time in the forest talking to himself and Bucky and the sky by turns. It only takes him four days to acknowledge that this is going to be something that he does, and then he starts bringing supplies along with him, letters and ink and scrolls of curling paper. He seems content to read them and write replies when necessary with one hand buried in Bucky’s feathers.

The visits are good for him, Bucky can tell - they’re good for both of them, in fact. Steve is always tense when he arrives, and no matter how much his letters and reports and proposals make him scowl and grumble angry, he’s always at least a little more relaxed when he leaves. It’s a point of pride with Bucky.

Bucky himself spends their hours together mostly doing nothing, happy enough to sit around and stare at Steve, to enjoy the hand combing gently through his feathers. He’s found that by sitting very still, by being generally preoccupied with small and pleasant things like the feeling of a hand in his feathers or the sight of Steve, small things will bubble to the forefront of his mind. Things like the burst of flavour from a blackberry popped into his mouth, the thrill of a hand brushing against his own in a room bubbling over with noise, the harsh whistling of cool air through panting lungs, the sweet ache of pushing himself to his limits. Things too specific and too vague all at once to be the product of nothing but imagination. Or so he hopes, anyway. What would a swan know of blackberries? Why would he know that flavour so precisely?

When he occupies himself with Steve, those little sensations - memories, if he’s feeling particularly daring - will take on a distinct tinge of the man himself: a small, determined figure, a flash of fire in blue eyes that are unmistakable, his stony determination when provoked. That’s not Bucky’s imagination - he remembers it, he swears he does.

James Buchanan Barnes has been missing for approximately two months. Bucky - the swan - escaped the castle a little less than two months ago, and he’d heard the name Bucky and felt it settle into him like it’s part of him. He has his own quiet suspicions about whether he’d always been a swan. He has his suspicions but he won’t voice them, tries not even to think about them, because he has next to nothing to back himself up. Because it’s utterly absurd and he’s still, undeniably, a swan, and he doesn’t want to be going mad.

Sometimes, though, he has to wonder if he’s entirely unravelling, if those small moments - especially of Steve - are true. When Steve arrives at the shore of the lake every morning, he seems to bear no resemblance to the man in Bucky’s mind - his shoulders tend to slump, and his eyes are - not quite dull, but certainly not as passionate as Bucky’s mind seems to think they should be. There’s a tightness to him that is unfamiliar.

He’s grieving, Bucky realises, some days later. Steve is grieving the late Queen, and the friend he’d named Bucky after, even if he would never admit to the second one.

Bucky shakes himself out of his mind and shifts closer to Steve at this realisation. At first it gets him nothing but a puzzled look, but when Bucky rests his neck directly over Steve’s head it gains him a laugh, Steve lighting up at the affection, at being able and allowed to return it. Bucky nibbles at the ear in front of him and revels in the laughter he wins. And, as always, the matter of Bucky’s own strange mind fades into the background: what’s important is Steve, and coaxing that laughter out of him.

~*~

It is on Steve’s eleventh visit that Bucky realises Steve has been a dumb asshole for all of eleven visits. Even then, he only realises this because there is a loud, annoyed shout of “ _Steven_!” accompanied by angry rustling through the undergrowth and several swear words. Steve jumps, and accidentally twists the feather he’d been holding; Bucky hisses and twists with discomfort, and Steve swears.

“Fuck - shit, sorry, I’m sorry -” he stutters as he smooths the feathers back into place, gentle hands running across the aggrieved area. The motion is lovely enough that it’s almost enough to drown out Bucky’s guilt; his first instinct may have been to twist away, but his second had been to fight, to lash out, and he’d only stopped himself by seconds, by moments. He doesn’t think he could forgive himself if he did anything to hurt Steve. “Hey, hey, it’s okay,” Steve soothes, oblivious, as Bucky makes a stuttering halting attempt to move away. “That must’ve hurt, yeah? I’m sorry.”

He sounds so sincere. And his blue eyes are so very wide and hopeful, and Bucky probably _should_ move away, but he can’t stand to cause those blue eyes pain. So he bows his head and steps closer, and Steve sighs, leans in to rest his closed eyes against Bucky’s neck just lightly.

“Brace yourself,” he mutters, talking more to himself than to Bucky, and sure enough only moments later the same deeply annoyed voice as before is yelling, “ _Steven Rogers_!” through a particularly loud crash of dry vegetation.

“Here,” Steve calls unenthusiastically. The rustling stops and then starts again, growing ominously closer for several moments before a man can be glimpsed through the trees.

Bucky may refuse to give in to his angry, territorial instincts against Steve, but he has no such compunctions about anyone else. Once it becomes clear that the voice is going to find them, Bucky starts hissing loudly, warningly, ready to fight for his human. It only deters the rustling for a second, unfortunately.

“Uh,” the man says as he stumbles out of the treeline and onto the lakeshore. “Um. Steve?”

“...Hi, Sam,” Steve says weakly, blushing fiercely. This is because Bucky has given in entirely to his instincts and has clambered onto Steve’s toroe, spreading his wings so that they rest against the ground on either side of Steve’s chest, caging him in where he’ll be safe. Bucky doesn’t know whether this is another swan instinct or some hazy memory-driven urge, but he has the fierce instinct that Steve is _his_ , and he has to protect what’s his. Nobody will be allowed to drag him away, at least not without Bucky as well.

“What the fuck, Steve,” Sam sighs.

“Um,” Steve says, voice still weak. If he was happy at the gentle affection of before he’s doubly happy about what is happening now, Bucky can _tell_ , and he’s extremely tempted to climb off and smack the alarmingly well-formed chest that he’s sitting on because nobody should be so happy to have a territorial, hissing swan draped over them. Steve is an idiot. “He’s not...usually like this?”

“Is he some sort of deity in disguise?” Sam snarks. His tone is flippant but his gaze hovers on the edge of concern, as though he truly believes that Steve could be held hostage by a bird. He even makes the abortive beginning of a movement like he doesn’t know whether to back away or step forward and try to extricate Steve. Bucky helps him to make up his mind by hissing loudly and beating his wings once, warningly, and sure enough Sam steps back, hands above his head. “Alright, you absolutely psychotic bird, I see that nasty little glint in your eye and you know what, you can keep him. Fuck, I’m not going anywhere near that, Steve.”

“This isn’t - that’s not - _Sam_ ,” Steve hisses, and Bucky can actually feel the chest he’s sitting on go tense and warm up. “His eyes are fine,” Steve says next, not even bothering to pretend to move away from Bucky. “I just - I believe he’s tame, all right? He came right up to me on the first day, I’ve never seen anything like it. And - well, and this is a nice place to think. Away from court.”

“And all the people at court,” Sam finishes. “I know, okay? Believe me, I know. But just because these are royal grounds doesn’t mean it’s safe. Especially in winter. You need a knight with you, Steve.”

Bucky stares down at Steve, suspicion and a horrible sort of realisation dawning on him. The Your Highness that had called Steve away - he’d been to satisfied at getting a name to focus on anything else, but it meant that Steve was royalty. _Is_ royalty, even. Of _course_ he should have a knight with him, and yet he hasn’t, not in all of his visits to the lake. Somewhat to his own horror, Bucky finds himself agreeing with Sam. Steve is ridiculous and idiotic and _stupid_. Winter is dangerous because winter is lean and cold and greedy. Poachers do their most profitable work in the snow. It is dangerous for Steve to be out here alone. Bucky scowls as best he can, and smacks his idiotic human with one wing.

“Ow! What was that for?” Steve asks indignantly as Sam folds his arms and eyes Bucky contemplatively. “I’m fine!”

Sam and Bucky make identical derisive noises at the same time, and turn to stare at each other with narrowed eyes.

“Truly, I’m fine,” Steve says, sitting up properly and wrapping his arms around Bucky. “I have J - the swan, look at him.” It’s enough to have Bucky puffing up slightly with pride and honking his agreement before Steve adds, “He’s enough to protect me.”

“Oh, sure,” Sam says. “You have a swan that poachers would definitely not be interested in at all, they’d leave you so alone as long as you’re next to a _swan_ , that’s fine, I see the logic here -”

Bucky honks again; indignant, this time. He refuses to be someone’s winter dinner.

“I know, but I really - I don’t need guards with me all the time,” Steve tries, and this time he even manages to sound somewhat reasonable about it. “We’ve been over this.”

“Yeah, sure, you don’t need your guards when you’re in the castle or on castle grounds _right next to the castle_ ,” Sam says. “The forest, though? Come on, Steve.” He folds his arms and eyes the two of them, Steve slumped over and Bucky perched on his chest. “What you need is to appoint a new First Knight.”

Steve tenses even more at the words, and his face twists with a mess of roiling emotion, all unpleasant - displeasure and fear and anger. “Shut _up_ ,” he snaps. “I don’t - Bucky’s not - he’s not -”

Bucky hisses at Sam supportively, even if his finds himself agreeing, deep down, with the points he’s making.

“I’m not saying he is!” Sam snaps. “I’m _not_ saying that. But he’s _absent_ , and someone needs to pick up the slack, and we’re all sick of trying to guard someone who runs away from us every chance he gets.” He takes a step towards Steve, possibly to underscore his argument, and Bucky’s hissing, spitting reaction is fierce. Steve is so clearly upset, his shoulders shuddering even as he tries heartbreakingly hard to keep an impassive face, and Sam is _not allowed_ to come closer.

“Yeah, you tell him,” Steve mutters into his palms. Sam’s too far away to hear what Steve says at a mumble, but he knows Steve well enough to frown suspiciously.

Sam sighs and starts looking around for a place to sit that is not the cold forest floor, ignoring the combined glares of both Steve and Bucky with the ease of someone well practiced in being glared at. “You’re an idiot,” he grumbles, but his soft tone is at odds with the harsher words.

That sentence rings particularly familiar. Bucky is fairly sure that he should be insulted on Steve’s behalf, but instead there’s only a sense of _yes, exactly_ in his chest. Steve _is_ a bit of an idiot, and that is undeniable no matter how Bucky chooses his side.

“How the hell did you find yourself taming a fuckin’ swan anyway?” Sam asks once he’s found a comfortable perch halfway up a tree, the subject change an olive branch. Bucky eyeballs Sam’s perch and smugly decided that the extra height wouldn’t save him if Bucky were to launch an attack. “Do I even want to know?”

“I swear to you, I didn’t do a thing,” Steve says. “Truly. I just...came here, and here he was.”

“I didn’t ask how you met him, I asked how you _tamed_ him,” Sam grumbles. “I did in fact assume that you met him on the banks of the only proper lake in the forest.”

Bucky huffs out an amused breath, and to his surprise Steve feels it and narrows his eyes. “You’re meant to be on my side,” he accuses, and Bucky lets out a louder huff just to wind him up a little. Steve rolls his eyes. “I believe he was already tamed,” he says, hands stroking through Bucky’s feathers. “He came right up to me like he knew me.”

“You shouldn’t have given him time to do that,” Sam muttered. “Should’ve run the fuck away, he’s a _swan_ \- this is why you need a knight following you around, Rogers.”

“Shut up, Samuel,” Steve fires back, wrapping his arms around Bucky. Sam rolls his eyes, and Bucky makes it a point to glare as hard as he can over Steve’s shoulder. “James isn’t -” Steve realises his mistake immediately and pushes onwards in an attempt to cover it up even as his face reddens, “he’s not aggressive. He’s never been aggressive, not with me.”

“ _James_?” Sam sputters, picking up on exactly what Steve had wanted him not to notice. “You named the swan after your - after _Bucky_? Steve -!”

“It was a joke,” Steve snaps defensively. “When Bucky comes back he’ll find himself upstaged by a swan who doesn’t give me stomach pains and anxiety.” Sam raises an unimpressed eyebrow and Bucky hisses at him.

Sam just sighs, put-upon as he hops off his tree branch. “Anyway,” he says. “You’re wanted back at the castle.”

“Of course I am,” Steve mutters. “I’m always wanted back in the castle.” He pushes at Bucky very gently, taking great care to set him down on his feet, and then stands up. Bucky dips his head to grab some of the lighter papers scattered over the grass and offer them to Steve.

When Steve finally turns to leave, everything gathered up and left clean behind him, Bucky articulates his displeasure as he always does, and Steve turns back as he always does, that gentle familiar smile on his face. “I’ll be back,” he promises, and it’s almost astonishing, how Bucky trusts him when he says that, how deep that trust goes. He could dive down into it and never hit a bottom, he thinks. He lays his head in Steve’s hand, and Steve holds it utterly still for a few seconds, stroking very gently with his thumb. He always waits to let Bucky be the one to end it, here.

Bucky stares up at Steve’s sweet face and coos as he pulls away. Steve grins. “See you later,” he murmurs, and finally allows himself to walk away.


	2. Chapter 2

Steve knows exactly what it looks like, that he’s been sneaking out of the castle and off castle grounds to spend long stretches of time by himself with only a swan he’s named James for company. To be truthful, he already thinks of the swan as Bucky, which - well, it would successfully annoy Bucky when he came back, but even without Sam knowing that Steve knows what this that looks like, and he avoids Sam’s gaze as they walk because of it.

Usually Steve finds the trip back to the castle calming, peaceful even, because the forest is quiet and undisturbed around him, the only noises breaking the silence small and ambient: the wind through the trees, the soft self-absorbed movements of other animals. This time, though, the walk is distinctly not calming. It’s partly the mere fact of Sam’s disapproving presence beside him, but also because Sam’s anger comes out in the form of aggressive, jerky movements that crackle loudly through the forest air. And yet both of them keep their mouths shut, until the silence between them is so stiflingly, profoundly uncomfortable that Steve is somewhat surprised that nothing in their vicinity shrivels up and dies.

This is his fault, though; he knows it’s no less than he deserves, and that’s why he’s the one to give in, to stop walking and break the silence with, “I’m sorry, alright?”, nervousness churning through his brain and coming out of his mouth as aggressiveness. Sam stops as well, and fixes Steve with an incredibly unimpressed stare, which, again: deserved. “I’m sorry,” Steve remeats, as sincere as he knows how to be. Sam and Nat and Clint, they’re tasked with his protection , and he’s been making their jobs far too difficult over the past couple of weeks.

He expects Sam to get angry, but he just looks tired, and somehow that’s worse. The silence stretches out between then as Steve stands awkwardly still and Sam rubs his face before finally saying, “I don’t want you to be sorry. I just - you have to stop doing this.”

Guilt slices through Steve’s chest, and he can feel his mouth twisting downwards. He knows better than this, he does - it’s not good for anybody if he goes somewhere without telling his guard, even worse if he misleads them, and he _knows_ the consequences that they - and everyone else - would face if something happened to him, and yet - and yet he’d done it anyway, far too many times over the past few weeks.

He didn’t even have an excuse, was the thing. Of course there were any number at his fingertips: that he was perfectly capable of defending himself, that royal forests were royal grounds and unlikely to contain violent trespassers, even that Bucky-the-swan was as good as a bodyguard, and all of those things were somewhat true. But to use them as excuses would be false, because Steve hadn’t been thinking of any of those things when he’d snuck into the forest time after time. “I will,” he finally makes himself say. This has gone on long enough. His heart hangs heavy in his chest, but he means it.

“Good,” Sam mumbles, and effectively ends the conversation by starting to walk again. His gait is a little less angry this time, at least. Steve bites back an exhale and follows, appropriately chastened. Sam has, if anything, been too soft on him; Steve shudders to think about the tongue-lashing that Bucky would inflict on him if it was Bucky he’d been sneaking away from.

Even the entirely hypothetical situation is enough to have Steve cringing; Bucky had been Steve’s friend long before he’d ever been his knight, but that had only made him more militant about keeping Steve safe at all times. They’d had to go through their own growing pains when Bucky had been appointed First Knight and neither of them had quite known how to handle the sudden shift from being around each other all the time as friends and being around each other all the time as a prince and his knight; still, Steve had never truly tried to get away from Bucky, and even during their worst fights they’d known where each other were. Bucky would have found him with unerring skill and may well have tried to strangle Steve for putting himself in unnecessary danger; in that regard, at least, Sam ought to be commended. Steve has been told many times - usually by Bucky - that he is eminently strangleable.

“What was I wanted for?” he asks, breaking the awkward silence just as they clear the treeline and the castle looms properly into sight, large and overbearing.

Sam’s shrug is short, but he still sends Steve a slightly sympathetic look at the prospect of being locked away to argue with his council. “They don’t tell me that kind of thing,” he says, and Steve nods. “You know where to find them.”

“Thanks,” Steve says quietly as he turns to leave. He stops in his tracks when Sam speaks again.

“You don’t have to do everything alone,” he says. It’s perhaps a little cowardly, but Steve doesn’t turn around. Sam continues anyway. “He was our friend too, you know. And so are you.”

The breath catches in Steve’s throat, and he forces his lungs to expand and contract mechanically as he tries to make his eyes stop burning. He takes a breath, and another, and another, and when he gets himself under control enough to turn around, Sam is already walking away. He sucks in one more breath, letting the cold air burn his throat and his lungs, and gives himself one moment to indulge himself: one moment to be tempted to run back into the forest, one moment to think wistfully about his swan and his lake, one moment of glaring at the tower the council room is in and thinking about setting Bucky-the-swan on anyone who tries to make him face his responsibilities.

He’s known for a long time that he will be the next to hold the crown. Ever since Peggy - Queen Margaret, in truth, but she’d swatted at him every time he’d tried to call her that - had chosen him some years after he’d come of age, to the surprise of everyone except Bucky, who’d just nodded at the offer as though he’d always been sure Steve would end up in this position. Even more recently, as she’d grown increasingly forgetful and confused, that reality had set in even more starkly. But now that it’s not an imminent, looming possibility, now that it’s _real_ , and now that he doesn’t have Bucky’s steady presence by his side - he’s not ready. He doesn’t feel ready, and he certainly doesn’t feel capable.

Moment over, he grits his teeth and makes his way up to the council chambers.

~*~

“Good afternoon,” he murmurs as he enters the council room. There’s a slew of quiet greetings in response, but the exasperation in them is clear, only grows clearer as Steve turns. It’s been a long time since Peggy had first chosen him as her heir for all that he’d been too small and too loud and too passionate, a long time since his existence had felt like it revolved around his perpetual awkwardness, but standing here it is as though all those old insecure emotions are bubbling to the surface.

“I was only alone from the courtyard to the council room,” he says resignedly, terribly achingly aware that he has just come out from the middle of the forest and probably looks it, and that his council are sitting in front of him with their seams straight and wrinkles fiercely flattened out of their clothes. Even the notoriously fussy robes that Lord Pierce and Lady Hill wear in court to denote their heraldry lie perfectly straight across their shoulders.

All of them are thinking the same thing, he can tell from the disapproval in their faces, ranging from carefully emotionless to badly concealed. It is Pierce who finally sits up to say, “The Prince is never meant to be alone. The King even less so.” His pale eyes are as sharp as his voice is soft, and Steve is far too aware of his gaze, of the easy, assured way he is sitting upright in his chair.

Steve would like nothing more than to snap at them, but he just presses his lips together. “It won’t happen again,” he says, and he tries to make it soft, he truly does, but it comes out more like a snap, and he’s not proud of it. The room goes even quieter, at the words or his tone or both, but Steve can still see the looks they shoot each other while he takes his seat. He clamps his mouth shut, properly this time, bites his lip hard enough to feel the throbbing of blood underneath thin skin.

“Perhaps it’s a good thing the topic’s been raised, in any case,” Coulson says, and Steve wants to slump down in his seat: he should have known better than to raise the topic. If he’d ignored them all, if he’d sat down without comment, they wouldn’t have accused him of anything. He has to remind himself that that’s not how he wants to run things, not how he wants to conduct his meetings. “It’s part of what we wished to talk about today. You need - that is, we think you should -”

“You need to appoint a new First Knight,” Pierce interrupts smoothly.

“I -” Steve starts, but he’s summarily hushed by both Fury and Lady Hill, which means he has no hope of anyone staying on his side.

“At least an acting First Knight,” Coulson says, very obviously trying to be persuasive. “You need a guard at all times, Your Highness. Even on royal grounds, as it were, you cannot continue in the way you’ve been accustomed - why, we ought to be talking about increasing your personal guard, four doesn’t seem -”

“I was just talking to Samuel on the way here,” Steve says, desperately trying to put an end to that train of thought, trying to soften the rudeness of the interruption with a nod of acknowledgement. “I’m going to ask him to be my acting First Knight.” It takes physical effort to stop himself from fidgeting; he half-expects someone in the room to challenge him about the ’acting’ part of the title, but nobody does. Then again, that isn’t particularly surprising, considering that nobody has yet brought themselves to debate Bucky’s disappearance. His absence hangs between them all, heavy and awkward even though his name has not been mentioned once. Steve’s chest aches at the thought of giving someone the title Bucky held. He’s always been Steve’s First Knight, and in Steve’s mind he still is.

“Oh, that’s good!” Coulson exclaims, waving away the slight. “Wonderful! Effective immediately?”

“Immediately,” Steve confirms quietly, fighting to keep his shoulders up. His council shoot him looks that contain various shades of sympathy, and he ignores that too; they’ve never discussed it, but he knows they think he’s foolish for insisting that Bucky will ever return. For even thinking that he’s still alive.

He and Bucky had been bound together; it’d been so that Bucky would feel if anything happened to Steve, but Steve clings to the fact that it worked the other way around, that he would feel it if something happened to Bucky, that he would _know_. 

“So that’s out of the way,” Lady Hill says, all no-nonsense business. “Good. We need to discuss this feast with you, if it’s truly going ahead.”

Steve blinks. “Feast?” he asks, racking his brains for any recent plans to arrange one and coming up entirely blank. He squints around the table suspiciously.

“Yes,” Hill says. “It’s generally an event with food and sometimes dancing.” Her face is entirely serious save for her eyes, which wrinkle with amusement.

“I know what a feast is,” Steve mutters at her. “What I _meant_ was that I don’t believe we’ve discussed having one.”

“That’s, ah, we’ve found ourselves discussing the possibility,” Coulson says, and adds very delicately, “usually in your absence, unfortunately.” It’s subtle, but it’s still a remonstration for Steve’s constant absences, all the time he’s spent in the forest, no matter that he tries to get some work done there as well. It’s enough to have him shutting up and leaning back to listen; his advisors have a bad habit of ganging up on him, and his trips into the forest make a ridiculously easy target for them.

“A feast,” Steve repeats. He doesn’t enjoy feasts in the slightest, and they all know it. “But the coronation is -” He breaks off, waves a hand, because it seems like every time they talk about plans for his coronation the dates are pushed further back for one reason or another.

“The coronation is several months away at the least, and likely even further than that,” Pierce says quietly, when it becomes clear that Steve is not going to finish his sentence. “This feast would be - well -”

“It’d be smaller,” Coulson supplies, always practical. It’s a good trait to have as a seneschal, but isn’t quite as useful when he finds himself needing to provide flowery language for Lord Pierce, who deals constantly with the titled families of the kingdom. Still, Pierce smiles ruefully and nods.

“Far smaller,” he concedes. “We think that it would be a nice gesture to hold it in honour of the late Queen. And, more usefully, it would be something of a practice run to get everyone in the castle working at that calibre again.”

“Not to mention society,” Hill says, earning herself a nod from Pierce. “A small event to reacquaint everyone after a quiet winter would be good preparation for the coronation.”

“Everyone could get their little spats out of the way and prepare themselves to show a united front before the foreign dignitaries who will be present for the coronation.”

“You’ve all thought this quite through,” Steve says dryly. The three of them only nod at him shamelessly, three nodding heads and Fury habitually still in his corner. When Steve looks at him, though, he bestirs himself to incline his head slightly, and the action, from him, holds the same significance as many nods.

“It wouldn’t cost terribly much,” Coulson ventures. “Even before factoring in the resources we could recycle.” Steve despises feasts, and he should probably put up more of a fight, but he cannot bring himself to raise the energy, let alone direct it anywhere meaningful.

 

“I assume you already have some plans,” he says, raising his eyebrows at his council, who don’t even bother to look sheepish as they nod again. “We can start looking over them.”

“I’m afraid that brings me to yet another topic,” Pierce says, before anyone can cut in. “Regarding your presence, both in these meetings and in the castle -” Steve hides a sigh, and steels himself for what is coming next, “You’re away entirely too often, Steven. And if we’re going to be planning a society event - even putting aside the issue of your safety, the forest is far too large and impractical a place to locate you when necessary.”

“We need you here, Steven,” Lady Hill agrees quietly. It is rare to see all his advisors united on one issue, but when it happens there is no stopping them. It’s madness or stupidity that has him haggling with them.

“It isn’t as though I’ve been neglecting my work,” he tells them, pointing out the pile of papers he’d brought into the room with him. “I can - I _do_ bring it with me.”

“You can do it here, and far more conveniently,” Pierce points out.

“I enjoy it in the forest,” Steve says. “It makes me feel grounded. Peggy was always so grounded,” he adds, which is true, but a very cheap shot. Everyone lowers their heads for a moment at the name of the late queen. “I would like to emulate that, where I can.”

The council look mildly impressed by this, except for Fury, who looks unconvinced. But then, a man in Fury’s position deals in secrets and intelligence; Steve isn’t entirely sure that he’s ever been fully convinced of anything.

“I’m sure we can come to some sort of agreement,” Hill says, relentless. It’s what makes her a very capable leader of foreign affairs, but Steve truly does wish sometimes that she wouldn’t use those skills on him. “How does two hours of two days of the week sound?”

“Three hours of four days,” Steve says, and braces himself as the room falls into discussion, surprisingly loud for only five people being present.

Pierce proposes no hours of no days, tone dry, and is summarily ignored. Fury passive-aggressively suggests that they move their meetings to the forest for five hours every day, which leads Pierce to propose they set up residence there and Fury to wonder in turn if the entire castle could be uprooted and moved on top of the forest’s lake, since that seems to be the place most favoured by the prince. This seems to be the cue for both of them to laugh companionably. Steve stares very hard at the table he’s at and does not bury his face in his hands.

Eventually they settle on two and a half hours, on three days of the week, to take place between mid-morning and midday so that early mornings - in case of overnight emergencies - and afternoons are free. In the true spirit of compromise, everyone comes out of the discussion vaguely unhappy with the way that things have turned out.

By the end of it, Steve is almost too tired to go on arguing: he’d placed a proposition to widen and diversify the council weeks ago, and he doesn’t think the sudden preoccupation with other issues is entirely a coincidence.

Still, there’s something in him that doesn’t know how to quit. “Widening the council,” he says simply, when Coulson asks what their next point of discussion will be, clearly hoping this is the end of the meeting. There’s a pause at his words, and then the room descends once more into arguing.

This time, though, they don’t achieve anything particularly productive: every keeps the same stances they’d been holding, and fails to convince everyone else to shift. Pierce is against the idea of appointing new advisors at all; Coulson is lobbying to create a second, larger council; Fury thinks Steve just ought to recruit a network of spies who can tell him what additional advisors will tell him; and Hill is the only one considering Steve’s original idea, which is to add select individuals from various specialisations to the council. He hadn’t thought it was particularly radical, but there has been a surprising amount of resistance to it.

They give up after twenty minutes of refusing to budge, which had been a rather excellent idea of Hill’s: if the discussion goes nowhere after twenty minutes, it’s over for the day. They all stalk out of the meeting room unhappy.

“Steven,” Pierce says as they filter into the corridor, somehow managing to manoeuvre himself between Coulson and Fury and earning himself a fond glance from Fury because of it. The occasionally-visible friendship between them made for one of the strangest pairs Steve had seen. “With regards to the matter of your guard -”

“I’ll deal with it,” Steve promises him, and departs hastily. It is really quite rude of him, but Steve thinks he can be slightly excuse, if only because his advisors - Pierce first among them - are incredibly skilled at forcing last-minute clauses into everything they get Steve to agree to and even some of the things he doesn’t. Especially given that they’ve just roped him into hosting a feast, Steve categorically does not want to know what his advisors have cooked up ‘with regards to the matter of the guard’.

~*~

The castle is somnambulant as it always tends to be in winter when there is less to attend to, but the courtyard is as alive as ever, the noise of good-natured shouting and telltale clashing of practicing duelists easily heard through the thick wooden door. If Steve’s guard are anywhere they are here; even Bucky in those rare times that he wasn’t planted next to Steve, could be found here, and when he could be cajoled into a fight it was a beautiful thing to watch. Steve had been known to initiate - and lose, more often than not - impromptu and entirely unnecessary sparring sessions just to watch him fight.

Bucky’s the wrong thing to think about, of course. It puts Steve’s mind back on the achingly empty space at his side, about how Bucky had been there so reliably for so long, guardian and friend. About how shyly the two of them had danced around each other, drawing close to each other. There’d been a hundred times they nearly kissed - a few times they’d even managed it, but they always pulled back, binary stars circling each other.

They’d grown complacent. Steve had always assumed that Bucky would stay with him, that eventually they’d coax each other into admitting what they both already knew, but - well. But. And now Steve has to appoint a new First Knight, as to refill the space that is _Bucky’s_.

Steve nearly turns and makes a run for it then and there, nearly turns back for the safety of his rooms without facing his knights for yet another day. He _could_ just turn around and walk away; it’d be easy enough.

As much as he would like to have finally opened the door purely out of his own courage, it does not turn out that way. The only reason he opens the door is because one of the young castle guard recruits, a perpetually awkward young man by the name of Peter, narrowly avoids tripping over and stabbing him with two dulled practice blades.

“I’m fine, Peter,” Steve says quickly, still not fast enough to beat Peter’s almost impressively garbled and panicked, “Oh, no, oh no, I’m so sorry, are you okay? Sir? You Highness?”

“I’m fine,” Steve repeats, and with Peter nodding anxiously and sending him anxious looks over his shoulder it seems like he may as well follow him out into the courtyard instead of heading back to his rooms.

Steve has never known the yard to be truly silent during practice hours, but it does grow noticeably quieter as soon as people see that he’s amongst them. They’re a motley bunch, a mix of castle guards, of higher-ranked visiting city guards, and the knights of various court officials important enough - or rich enough - to warrant hiring a personal guard, but all of them grow a little quieter upon seeing him. Some of them do a double-take at the sight of Steve walking alone, some of them look around expectantly for his guard to make an appearance, and all that does is make Steve more uncomfortably aware of the gaping void that is following him doggedly.

Sam, Nat, and Clint have gathered together at the far corner of the yard, naturally, a small tight group that is striking nevertheless - Nat’s bright hair, Clint’s broad shoulders, and Sam’s piercing gaze are all easily visible, even across the chaotic yard. Even as Steve draws closer to them they barely spare him a glance, which is pretty much what he deserves from them.

“I owe you an apology,” he says as he reaches them. No preamble. No nervous aggression in his tone, this time. Sam and Clint are already eyeing him sort of approvingly, and absurdly enough he wants to tell them to stop it, to put him through his paces a little more. “I owe you all an apology.”

“You do,” Natasha says, not quite aggressively. Aggressively neutral, perhaps. Clint frowns and nudges her, but Steve shakes his head.

“No, you’re right. I do. I’ve been stupid, these past few weeks.”

“Months,” Natasha says again, sharper. “Don’t pretend this started with the Queen.”

“Months,” Steve repeats, quieter. “You’re right. I’ve been avoiding you, and I know you have responsibilities -” He breaks off and sighs, frustrated, not quite sure how to articulate what he has in his brain.

“We know, okay?” Sam says gently. “We know how worried you are about him.”

“He picked the worst time to go and disappear on you,” Clint adds. The three of them know that he’s bound to Bucky because they were the witnesses to the spell, but Steve knows that they don’t necessarily share his views on the precise mechanics of the spell - he knows that Sam and Clint have reservations about the strength of the binding, and he is fairly sure that Natasha has convinced herself that Bucky is dead, the number of times she has told them that none of her contacts have passed on any word about him. Ordinarily Steve would probably have some similar reservations about the magic, but right now he can’t afford that; this binding is his lifeline, in a sense that is dangerously close to being literal. He is fairly sure he would have run himself into the ground long before this point had he not had this reassurance lurking in the back of his mind; even with it, he knows he has been awfully cagey, that he has lost weight, that he has constantly dark circles under his eyes.

“We don’t like it either,” Sam says. “We were his friends, you know that.” There is such compassion in his gaze that Steve has to look down. “We just thought you were our friend, too.” He says, and the words punch at the air in Steve’s lungs.

“If I am, I’m the worst one you’ve got,” Steve mutters, and Clint throws an easy arm around his shoulders, like it’s all that simple.

“Nah,” he says. “It’s you and Bucky, y’know? Of course you needed some time to process before appointing someone else to his position.”

“I - yeah,” Steve says in a murmur. He shouldn’t be so surprised, really, at Clint getting it; Clint has a vaguely alarming habit of being surprisingly emotionally intelligent at the most unexpected of times. “Yeah, that’s exactly right.”

Natasha just rolls her eyes at him, although she does it a little more warmly. “Every single one of us knows that we wouldn’t be taking Bucky’s place, silly,” she says, fondness leaking into her tone. The beginnings of a smile nudge the corner of her mouth upwards, and warmth swells in Steve to see it. “We’re going to be kicked right back down to Knight status as soon as he crawls out from whatever rock he got shoved under and you’re done being angry at him.”

The gentle smile she aims at him is more than enough to confirm that her wording was entirely intentional. It makes tension relax out of Steve’s shoulders, the reminder that he’s not the only one who thinks Bucky might have been forced out of court, that threats or coercion were involved in his sudden disappearance.

“I wouldn’t say _kicked_ down, exactly,” he tries to protest, but Sam cuts him off.

“Are you joking, Rogers? We’d be glad for it,” he assures Steve. “Who’d wanna deal with you all day every day? We can’t all have Barnes’s patience.”

“Just for that, _Samuel_ , you’re my acting First Knight,” Steve retorts, hands on hips and suppressing a smile as Sam groans theatrically. He’d been intending to ask Sam in any case - Natasha liked the shadows too much to stand out in the open beside Steve, and Clint’s strength had always been guarding from a distance, which, while a good quality in a knight, was a bad quality in a First Knight - but this was far more satisfying than simply asking.

Sam grumbles and folds his arms, but his efforts to be theatrically put-upon are somewhat impeded by the fact that he is still holding a sword, which proves to be quite the stabbing risk. “Fine, I _guess_ ,” he says, and then adds, petulant, “I can’t believe you’ve gone and made me look forward to Barnes getting back.” It pulls a grin out of Steve before his mind circles back to the ever-present wistful part that is always after reassurance, always asking _you really think he’s coming back_?

“No offence, Steve, but we’re all going to be glad when Bucky comes back,” Clint says, stretching luxuriously. Natasha pokes at his exposed stomach, lightning-fast with one thin bony finger, and he squawks and bats her away before continuing, “You’ve been a sad sack ever since he disappeared.”

Natasha rolls her eyes again. “Just because it’s true doesn’t mean you have to say it,” she says. Clint shrugs and glances at Steve, who does likewise.

The good-natured ribbing from them has Steve relaxing, feeling like a weight on his mind has been lifted. As those these three have abruptly taken some of the worry and tenseness and anxiety he’s been carrying around for so very long and shredded it, casually, with comfortably sharp words. Recently, he’s trapped himself in his own head, surrounded himself in nature and silence and his swan, and now that he’s surrounded by people once again there’s something uniquely grounding about it. People who like him, who are teasing him, who share the same worries as he does. People who also thought that Bucky was alive and somewhere out there, or who at least had the desire to pretend alongside Steve’s belief -

In that direction lay far too many anxious spirals that Steve has stumbled down time and time again over the past few months. Bucky would never leave him, no matter that his room had been carefully undisturbed the morning after he’d disappeared, no matter that there’s been no word of him from Natasha’s spies and Fury’s. He’ll come back, Steve is sure of it. He has to be.

Besides which, for all that there’s been no word of Bucky, there’s been no body, either, not in the forest and no mysterious unidentified corpses in the city. There were a multitude of good reasons that Bucky wasn’t dead: because nobody would kill a First Knight and then proceed to not press their advantage while the prince panicked and wallowed and neglected to appoint someone else to the position. Because he hadn’t felt anything through their bond. Bucky hadn’t died because - because he _couldn’t_ , not while he had Steve to live for.

Sam shifts his weight from one leg to another and bumps Steve in the process, successfully halting his brain’s rapid train of well-worn thoughts. In the space of a blink, he goes from absorbed in his own mind to occupied with watching his knights bicker instead, an argument about tact versus honesty versus knowledge that is rapidly going off the rails.

“With us again?” Sam asks, raising an eyebrow. Steve squints at him.

“Yes,” he admits finally, to a reception of snorts. “Shut up.”

His knights treat him so casually, so easily. When he’s with them, comfortable and bantering and unavoidably present, it’s almost easy for Steve to bundle together all the grief and anxiety and doubt that threats to stifle him when he is alone, when he grows too complacent. Bucky would come back if - when - he could, and he could because he’s the most capable person that Steve knows. He’d be fine. And in the meantime Steve would submit to keeping himself safe, the better to welcome him home.

He’s never been the best at subterfuge, and his thoughts must show up on his body somewhere, in his expression or his posture or his gestures, because Sam shoots him a grin and Nat a nod. He smiles back, and lets his resolve suffuse through his mind.


	3. Chapter 3

Bucky had been right, those first few despondent moments after his flock had left: winter only grows colder and harsher as the days pass. The already-meagre plants that remain in the water curl up and almost seem to fade away before Bucky’s eyes, leaving him with big eyes and a bigger space in his stomach. He’s not entirely sure that he would have made it through the winter without resorting to drastic measures if it wasn’t for Steve.

Steve still comes to visit, but after that fateful interruption he tends to come less often, leave earlier, and is accompanied by at least one knight every time. Bucky can’t say that he’s particularly happy about any of these developments save perhaps the presence of the knight, but Steve more than makes up for it; Bucky would be content just for his company, but the bags of watercress that Steve brings with him don’t hurt.

The guards - they change as the days pass, but the first one Bucky had seen, the one named Sam, he was the one to accompany Steve most often - all learn very quickly that the lakeside is Bucky territory, because Bucky is a gentle, inspiring teacher. He magnanimously allows them to remain on the edges, the better to keep an eye on Steve, even allows occasional commentary and half-shouted conversations, but he hisses and postures as soon as they make to come any nearer to Bucky and Bucky’s lake and Bucky’s prince.

Steve just laughs every time Bucky continues to enforce his boundaries. It ears him a great number of dirty looks from his knights, but he never seems to mind. It warms Bucky’s heart to hear him laugh, that big round noise rolling around the trees. He hadn’t known it was familiar until he’d heard it, and then his mind had gone: _yes, that. that’s right_.

That’s how it always happens. Steve - or occasionally his guard - will do something, or say something, and Bucky’s brain will react like he’s known it all along, opens up vage and hazy new possibilities, new memories: ten different types of laughter, all hard-won but worth the effort, the clash of swords and the savage vibration of the impact up his arm, the electricity that comes with a clandestine brush of fingers together. It’s all there, and it’s so little, and yet he knows down to his bones that there is so much more to recall - it is _infuriating_. There is so much he doesn’t know, and he hates it. For a while, he tries to provoke every emotion under the sun in Steve and his guard, anything for just a scrap of memory back, but it feels like the more he tries the less he gets.

He will never admit to taking his emotions out on Samuel, but the other man does make a perfect target of himself. Every time he tries something is invariably followed by loud swearing and complaining and heckling which in turn invariably leads to Steve trying his best to be appropriately reproachful and failing; once this had yielded a brief sense-memory of similar heckling in a courtyard, but most of the time he just enjoys it for what it is.

It doesn’t take him long to learn that trying to wrench something new out of the steel trap of his own mind is a useless activity. He keeps trying anyway, but eventually even those efforts peter out hopelessly as he switches most of his focus to Steve: it is surprisingly satisfying, to listen to him complain about the upcoming feast, about coronation preparations, about his advisors and their resistance to a relatively simple proposal. On particularly bad days he manages to complain almost ceaselessly, from the moment Bucky sees him walking into the clearing with his habitual bag in hand all the way to the moment that he leaves. 

“Recycling my foot,” Steve grumbles as he looks over the various proposals for the upcoming feast, crossing out one particular suggestion so savagely that the point of his quill tears through the parchment. “You can’t recycle _effort_.”

The thing was that hosting the feast was a good idea on paper, and both Bucky and Steve know it; off paper, though, and very quickly it became very clear that having a castle host two fairly large events in such a short amount of time is going to be stressful, no matter how much money they can save by doing so.

“Peggy would have smacked them all for trying to decorate the feast in her honour with _purple_ ,” Steve scoffs; today’s complaints seem to centre mostly on the colour scheme. “Red and blue or nothing.”

Bucky snorts, and the sound has Steve glancing up almost wildly until he spots Bucky. “Oh,” he says, relaxing slightly. Trying to hide the disappointment in his eyes. “I thought -” He glances backwards, where Sam is pretending to doze on a tree branch while he keeps an eye on the area. “Well, you sounded like the real Bucky, for a moment,” Steve whispers to Bucky.

He turns back to his work, but Bucky has no such distraction from his own thoughts, and with only a few words Steve has dug out the most improbable, fantastical idea that Bucky has been careful to shove to the back of his mind. He doesn’t think he can be blamed if he’s not entirely able to sit still.

He’s not quite sure when he begins to start suspecting - who or what he might have been, before he’d been a swan. It was entirely possible that the best answer was the simplest one, of course, that he’d always been a swan and the only thing special about him was a particularly awful memory and an overdeveloped sense of affection for particularly hapless idiots who stumbled through forests when they got upset. But it also seemed entirely possible, that - well, that that wasn’t the case. That’d he’d been something - some _one_ \- else before he’d been a swan.

It was ridiculous and he knew it. It was why he didn’t like to think about it, why he still wasn’t sure whether he could call himself suspicious. It’s not a particularly _brave_ thing to do, to sit on those unsettling thoughts and push them to the back of his mind, but there’s a small, scared part of him that doesn’t want to know the truth. Because the truth is that he’s either a deeply confused swan or a deeply confused human who’d been turned into a swan, and he has no concrete proof that the answer will be what he wants to to be. Every time he looks at Steve he feels - he _wants_ to be Bucky Barnes, and he doesn’t know whether he can be, doesn’t know how to find out.

So he just - he doesn’t like thinking about it, is all.

~*~

What changes things - what _finally_ changes things - is Steve himself. Of course it is. Bucky’s not sure why he’d ever entertained any other possibility. Steve’s complaining about - something, the neverending preparations for a feast, the planning of table placements and the boatloads of invitations - half to Bucky and half to Sam on his perch, as usual, when he apparently grows exasperated enough that he leans down and buries his face in Bucky’s neck.

And Bucky freezes, because - that. He _knows_ that feeling, the pressure of Steve’s nose and the flutter of his eyelashes. He knows it on skin, instead of through feathers. He knows the way those warm fingers feel splayed out against his skin. Steve is still mumbling, but for once Bucky has entirely stopped listening.

At first he thinks it’s just another fleeting moment to catalogue and obsess over later, quietly, but he’s very quickly proven wrong when his first proper memory filters through his mind, his first proper sequence instead of a singularity. He can remember the first time he’d seen Steve,when the two of them were barely larger than children and Steve had been wandering around the city markets with an extraordinarily lost expression that was only slightly visible underneath his determined fierceness.

“What’cha lookin for?” Bucky had asked, the third time the unfamiliar boy had passed him. 

Steve had surveyed him with a deeply suspicious expression, but eventually said, “Leeks and mushrooms.” He’d been clutching money in his hand so tightly that his knuckles were white. “My ma’s meant to get them today, but she’s sick. She sent me instead.”

They’d bought scallions instead of leeks and their selection of mushrooms had been unnecessarily varied because Steve wasn’t entirely sure what type his ma wanted, both in amounts that seemed frankly preposterous to Bucky. He remembered how the two of them, loaded down with scallions and mushrooms, had seen a scuffle break out on a corner, remembered how he’d had to grab Steve and physically drag him away to keep him from defending the younger boy getting his lunch stolen. He remembered his increasing trepidation as they’d gone to the edge of town right beside the castle, where the richest folk in the city lived, remembered his absolute shock and befuddlement when Steve had waltzed his way past the guard with only a simple greeting. When Steve had dragged Bucky down to the kitchen to see his ma, who’d been stirring a pot they probably both could have fit in, their load of vegetables had started to make more sense.

The memory was slightly hazy, slightly unclear, like he was looking at his own experiences through thick glass, and he couldn’t remember anything after that, but Bucky remembered. He remembered what had happened and why and how, in so much more detail than ever before. That meant something, it had to mean something.

At first he thought it must have been a fluke. A particularly strong memory making itself known in response to a particularly powerful stimulus. Except - except the thing is, they keep coming.

Not every day, and he still sees those brief flashes that tell him so little and so much, but often enough that it’s impossible not to notice, impossible to dismiss them. One by one, memories unfold gently, almost shyly, in his mind, and no matter that most of what he remembers is from when he was a child; these experiences are much harder to explain away as the products of an overactive imagination. It’s hard to think that he could be making all of this up in the way that he might make up a single, unclear, fleeting moment. And that means he’s a swan with a set of memories that distinctly do not belong to a swan.

The day that he remembers Bucky going through an annoying teenage phase of ruffling Steve’s hair at every opportunity, Bucky decides to hell with being a swan, stretches out a wing and ruffles Steve’s hair in - a similar way as in the memory, if entirely different given that he’s working with wings instead of hands.

It doesn’t quite work the way that he wants it to. Steve doesn’t look at him with any more recognition in his eyes than before; his eyes are wide and staring, somewhat stunned. Sam starts laughing. Steve doesn’t even move to throw his knight an annoyed look. Bucky is starting to be slightly afraid that he’s broken his human when Sam comprehensively breaks his concentration by falling off his perch.

“Sam? Sam, you okay?” Steve asks, jumping to his feet, leaving Bucky and his rapidly dwindling hope behind. If Bucky could scowl, he would.

“He _ruffled your hair_ ,” Sam hoots, regrettably unharmed and far too loud. “What the _fuck_!”

He sounds near tears with the force of his laughter. Bucky marches over and smacks him in the head.

~*~

Bucky is - relatively certain of himself now, of his memories and their dysfunctional relationship with his current shape, and the real Bucky, the human Bucky, who is missing. What convinces him is the kiss.

It’s a quick, innocuous moment for Steve; one afternoon as he pulls away, he presses an affectionate kiss to Bucky’s head, the kind that one would bestow upon a beloved pet or mischievous child. For Bucky it’s altogether different, because upon receiving one kiss he remembers another: the two of them together in the forest, Steve’s teasing smile, his lips brushing so very lightly across Bucky’s for an instant before he pulls away. He’s been blushing but fierce, feet planted even when it was evident he’d quite like to run away, and Bucky had felt that warm unstoppable wave of fondness he’s become so familiar with over these past several weeks. He’d reeled Steve back in for a proper kiss, sweet and before he’d thought it through, before he’d remembered that it was his job to guard Steve, not distract him.

The sensation of his mind dipping into a new-old memory is familiar; the jitters down his neck and through his body are not. For a moment his skin feels tight, strained, like he’s about to burst out of it. It takes long minutes for the feeling to settle down and tuck itself away, and by then Steve has stood up and is preparing to leave, and Bucky has more important things to worry about. He feels more bereft than he ever has at Steve’s departure, even counting those first few visits where he’d had no reason to believe that Steve would return. His entire body feels weighed down with his strange errant emotions.

But, at least, it solidifies something in him, some resolve, pushes away the doubts that have been plaguing him. His other memories had felt believable, had felt real, but this one - that rush of fondness, that unbearable warmth he’d felt when they’d kissed, when he _remembered_ that they’d kissed - it settles him. It gives him that sense of certainty he’s been so sorely missing for so long.

He’s almost certain, he’s certain: he’s not the swan he looks like.

So he tries everything he can to get Steve to recognise him, or at least to _suspect_ that he’s something more than a terribly intelligent bird: he pecks Steve affectionately on the same shoulder he would slap as a human, he brings the habit of the annoying hair ruffle back, he tries to swing an arm around Steve’s neck and drag him in close. That particular endeavour fails, and even manages to have the usually stoic Natasha snorting when he tumbles backwards as Steve frowns at him.

What’s _important_ , though, is that he thinks he’s doing a fairly decent job of imitating the mannerisms he’d had when he was human.

Steve, though - it all slips right by Steve’s oblivious, pretty head. No matter how insistently Bucky repeats the gestures he remembers, no matter how hard he tries to imitate a human, all he can pull out of Steve is a wistful sigh. On one occasion, Steve says mournfully, “Maybe there’s magic to a name, after all. You remind me so much of him.” Bucky considers himself a fairly patient person, a fairly level-headed person, but in that moment he want much wants to slightly kill one Steven Grant Rogers. He _is_ the person that Steve’s missing, he’s sure of it. He thinks he’s sure of it.

Samuel shakes his head minutely at Steve’s words. Bucky snaps his beak threateningly, and Sam puts his hands up, all wide-eyed innocence. It’s progress, Bucky decides dignifiedly, that the association is there, even if it’s not quite the association that Bucky is after.

“Hm,” Steve says unhappily, and presses his face into Bucky’s neck. In the face of that - well, Bucky can’t be too angry. He feels simmering exasperation, maybe. He’ll keep trying.

~*~

One morning Bucky lets his exasperation truly show and screeches at Steve with all the pent-up frustration he feels: at Steve, at himself, at his own faulty, manipulated memory. That, of all things, is what has Steve looking at him more speculatively than he ever has before. Their eyes meet, and Steve’s mouth opens slightly, disbelievingly. Hope builds in Bucky’s chest like a crashing wave, straining to be released -

Steve shakes his head and stands to leave. Bitterness floods through Bucky, but he can only slump, can’t even bring himself to screech again. That afternoon, as Steve leaves, a mournful little nugget builds itself in Bucky’s chest, and shows no sign of abating as the day rolls on, uncaring and unconcerned of his worries. In fact, it seems as though he only grows progressively more anxious as time passes, midday becoming afternoon and then evening and then night.

Bucky shifts around, he swims, he can’t find a comfortable position. His skin feels too tight around him and his feathers itch as though they could slough right off at the wrong kind of touch. His entire body feels as though it’s doing nothing but holding its breath, itching and waiting and positively gagging for something to happen.

It really shouldn’t be as much of a surprise for him as it is, then, when something finally does happen.

In this case, ‘something’ is transforming back into a human shape while he is pushing himself restlessly across the surface of the lake. One moment he is floating and the next his entire body feels like it’s blurring in and out of focus and abruptly he has _arms_ again, he has _legs_ and a _human-shaped body_ \- 

A human-shaped body which, it becomes clear after a moment, is not as buoyant as his swan-shaped body. When the magic releases him, he feels himself falling, held implacably in the clutches of gravity, and in an instant he splashes through the surface of the lake he’d previously floated on with a half-shouted, “ _Fuck_!”

The lake is cold during winter nights, and Bucky is utterly submerged. And to rub salt into the freezing-cold wound, he’s nearly in the centre of the goddamn water, about as far away from any shore he can get. In the time that it takes him to frantically paddle over to the nearest bank he’s already started shivering, his teeth chattering as he tries not to inhale any water.

“What the shit,” he mutters through shaky breaths as he drags himself onto the dirt, gasping in lungfuls of air as soon as his nose and mouth are a safe distance from the water. “What the _shit_.” The ground scrapes across his belly and his wet hair slaps him in the face as he turns his head. Everything, in that moment, seems like that most profound kind of unfairness.

Something snorts in the distance. Bucky wraps his arms around himself tightly in a desperate bid to warm up; it doesn’t really work, because his arms are just as wet and cold as the rest of him, and his heavy, waterlogged sleeves slap wetly against his legs. His brain is utterly blank as he stares down at himself. He’s got - he’s wearing clothes, which - it must mean he was wearing clothes when he was transformed into a swan - so perhaps - he was Bucky, or he wasn’t always a swan -

_Steve_ , he thinks, and the next thing he knows he’s on his feet, stumbling through the forest. His thoughts are scattered, unfocused; he doesn’t know what to make of this, of any of it, and he only he doesn’t run headlong into any trees by the skin of his teeth and sheer luck. The wind is quite likely rather mild, but against his wet skin and waterlogged clothes the cool breeze feels like a merciless bite against all his skin, all at once. He can’t feel his feet, but somehow they manage to keep stumbling along, like they have a mind of their own.

The top of the castle is visible when he looks up, the turrets reaching upwards to blot out the night sky. Almost as soon as Bucky makes the observation, he runs headlong into a some kind of barrier, or what feels like one, and staggers backwards several steps as pain blooms in his nose and right shoulder, which had taken the brunt of the impact. When he looks ahead of him, though, there’s nothing but the treeline, and the immaculate castle gardens beyond that. It’s as though all he has to do to find Steve is step forward into the castle’s gardens.

But of course nothing can be that easy for him. When Bucky moves forward again he’s more cautious, this time, but it doesn’t help in the least; he’s barely taken three steps when he walks right into that barrier again. There’s more yield to it this time, probably because he’s not running headlong into it - he’s able to take a few slow, stumbling steps forward, at least. It feels as though he’s walking through honey, his limbs slow and ungainly, and then that warm strange blurring sensation overtakes him once more. When his foot comes down again it has a considerably longer distance to fall, because he’s a swan again.

“ _Fuck_!” he yells again, or tries to. The shout comes out as a loud, garbled honk as his legs kick out helplessly and his arms - his wings, god damn it, fuck - wave wildly and unhelpfully as he descends into a pile on the ground.

For a moment he just lies there, crumpled and frustrated and hurting. When he finally looks up the guards around the castle are staring in his direction, and Bucky shies backwards into the safety of the trees; he’s a swan again, and thus not in very good shape to convince Steve that he’s - well, not a swan. Besides which, he’s fairly sure he knows what will happen if the guards see a rogue swan trying to break into the castle, and he doesn’t see it ending well for him.

Making his way back through the forest is the strangest experience. He’s been a swan for months now, that a few weeks - a few _days_ \- ago he hadn’t even been sure he’d ever been human, and yet somehow he’s awkward and stumbling and unfamiliar in this body now. He’d adapted to having a human body again thoughtlessly, mindlessly, and now his steps are trying to be too wide and he’s trying to swing his arms as he walks. His movements are as awkward and fumbling as they’d been those first confusing, amnesia-riddled days on the lake, when he’d had to learn from the other swans how to swim when it should have been natural instinct.

Once Bucky has made his way back to the lake it looks entirely innocent in the moonlight, the breeze pushing slight ripples across its surface that catch the moonlight and sparkle. It doesn’t look like the unpleasant expanse of cold and wet that Bucky know it, intimately, to be. The aftershocks of the sudden submergence are still crawling unpleasantly through his skin, so he thinks it’s understandable when he approaches the water with caution, reaching out to test the tip of a wing against the water, and then more, and slightly more, and then abruptly he’s a human again, teetering forward with his hand extended in freezing cold water.

“Shit,” he gasps, scrambling backwards towards safety and cradling his wet hand to his chest. The night air burns against his throat as he breathes in, as he speaks. “Shit, shit. Seriously?”

There’s no answer except for the rustling of bare branches in the wind. Honestly, he’s glad of that.

He doesn’t really know what else to do, so he makes his way to the edge of the forest again, carefully chooses a slightly different place to before, and tries to walk through the barrier again. Even though he knows to expect the fall, he can’t quite manage a graceful landing. Or any landing at all; he winds up splayed out on his back, quite definitely a swan once again, staring up at the castle.

He goes back to the lake and, for the third time, touches it to blur back into his human body. He’s still vaguely damp, and the cold air still scrapes unpleasantly across his skin, but he’s nowhere near as wet as he’d been before, as though each transformation had taken more water off him. 

Impulsively, he pinches the thin skin at his base of his wrist, and winces when it hurts.

It hurts, but he doesn’t wake up. It feels like a confirmation: this is real. He’s real. But as for what _else_ that means -

Bucky doesn’t know much about magic. He’s not sure that many people do; almost as long as he can remember it’d been something nobody had talked about, and sometimes people would head into the mountains east of the border where, it was rumoured, there was a school of magic who would accept students. He’d thought, like everybody else, that would change when Sorcerer Strange had swept back west, declared there’d been a shift in power, and set up his school in the middle of the city. But the truth was the school was just as implacable and unknowable in the middle of the city as it’d been in the mountains; it accepted very few applicants, and it never opened its doors.

He remembers that Sorcerer Strange had visited court exactly once, to ask permission to build his school and, as a gesture of good faith, to cast wards around the castle, to promise magical healing if it ever became necessary, and to extend a nebulous gesture of good faith. Queen Margaret had accepted all three offers gracefully, and then asked for a spell that would keep Steve safe, as that gesture of good faith. Strange had bound Steve and Bucky together, knight and prince, with eyes that darted between the two of them and knew too much.

That’s a comfort, at least. That they’re bound together, that Bucky remembers it. He hopes that it has helped Steve, during his disappearance.

He might not know anything about magic, but this can’t be anything but. It’s real - he’s fairly sure it’s real, and he’s not imagining things; he truly has been transformed into a swan for whatever godforsaken reason, and that has to have been done with magic. It puts him at a disadvantage - he doesn’t know the first thing about magic. He knows what he’s been told in fairytales and bedtime stories, neither of which are particularly renowned for their accuracy.

His memory’s been coming back with greater and greater strength, but he still doesn’t know how well his knowledge lines up with recent events - he’s gotten to a stage where he and Steve are adults, where the Steve in his memories looks definitively like the Steve so often in front of him, but for all he knows he still has months missing, years. It means that even if his most recent memories say that nothing out of the ordinary had happened, that nobody was particularly angry at Steve or at himself, couldn’t be taken as reliable evidence. All he has is speculation: had it been an accident? How could it have been? If it was, surely he’d’ve been informed, given his sentience as a swan - besides which, an accidental or unknowing transformation didn’t quite match with his memory of escaping, the vague impression that unpleasant things had been happening to him. But if he took that at face value, and this _had_ been done on purpose - why?

Bucky has finally gotten an answer to one of his questions, and all it’s doing is opening up an entirely new can of worms. Several cans, even.

He’s still sitting some distance away from the lake when the sun comes back up, but nevertheless: he turns back into a swan. The sensation of it is almost familiar now, for all that it’s still not quite describable. When he moves forward to touch the water his shape doesn’t change. He retreats from the water anyway, just to be safe, and twists his head back to bury his face in his feathers to try and calm his racing thoughts.

As soon as he finds himself in comfortable darkness, the fact that he’s had no sleep all night his him like a train, and the next thing he knows is not knowing anything at all.

~*~

The following nights - and days - yield similar results. He can’t quite tell what time the shift occurs, but it’s well after dark, always when he can see the moon, and always when some part of him is touching the lake. It’s a very difficult balancing act, to get a part of him in the water enough to transform but not far enough that he falls in; when he’s disoriented after his transformation it’s remarkably easy to stagger in exactly the wrong direction and end up soaked to the bone yet again, swearing and shivering.

He’d made exactly two attempts to go and see Sorcerer Strange now that he’s certain, for all that he turns back into a swan at the boundary between forest and city, and both of them had been thwarted by people who didn’t even have the decency to look hungry as they eyed him speculatively and looked around for their hunting weapons. He could take a person, he’s no doubt of that, but a group of them? He still refuses to be anybody’s dinner. It’s far safer for him to stay in the forest, so that’s what he does.

What he needs is to get Steve or one of his guards into the forest with him. But that task seems even more insurmountable than mapping every inch of the boundary for weak spots; Steve is the crown prince, the soon-to-be-king, and his guards spend their time with or near him. Of everyone Bucky knows, they are the least likely to be able to make it out to the forest at midnight.

Of course, Steve might not even comprehend that Bucky wants him to come out to the forest at midnight, that dear sweet idiot. He still had no idea that Bucky is _Bucky_ , and quite frankly Bucky had given up on trying to convince him when he could _show_. To do that, though, he’s going to have to get Steve to come into the forest in the middle of the night, and - well, it’s a simpler message than the other one Bucky had been trying to get across, but somehow and for some reason he doesn’t have a lot of faith in Steve’s ability to interpret him, or to follow through if he did understand. And to be fair - why _should_ he follow a swan into the forest just because it wants him to?

Still, Bucky steels himself. He has to try, if nothing else.

~*~

“Oh, you’re affectionate today,” Steve says amusedly that afternoon, petting Bucky on the head with gentle fingers. It’s doubly insulting, because Bucky is extremely demonstrative on all days and also because Steve is utterly missing the point of what Bucky is trying to say. He’d been grabbing at Steve’s hand because he wanted the quill in it, and failing that, he’d tried shoving one wing over Steve’s eyes in an attempt to mimic nighttime darkness, neither of which had been intended as any kind of extreme form of affection. He honks with exasperation and climbs off Steve, dignifiedly ignoring Samuel’s snorting laughter.

He glares at the still-laughing Sam and regroups, marching towards him to make another attempt at getting his message through. It’s almost unfortunate that this plan could similarly go ahead with Sam, because the other man has long learned to keep his distance from Bucky.

“Steve!” Sam ends up yelling, scrambling around a tree trunk as Bucky follows him, trying his best to honk in code and being utterly ignored. “Get your fucking swan away from me!”

Bucky screeches in displeasure and snaps at Sam. The other man’s yelp is uniquely satisfying but not at all helpful to Bucky in the present moment.

“C’mon, Buck,” Steve says reproachfully, swooping down like he’s a bird and scooping Bucky into his arms. “What’s gotten into you, hm?” 

Bucky tries to honk angrily, but it comes out inexcusably plaintive instead. Steve smiles down at him, which is lovely, and boops him on the beak, which is an indignity Bucky would not suffer from anyone else.

“I still think it’s weird you named him Bucky,” Sam says resentfully from his position safe on the lower branches of the tree he’d been scrambling around. “Uncanny similarity or no.”

“Coming from the man who thought Redwing was a good name for a falcon,” Steve snorts. Sam narrows his eyes and opens his mouth, but Steve beats him to it. “Be nice,” he says, voice placid as his arms tighten pointedly around Bucky. Sam mumbles something inaudible ad doubtlessly insulting from his perch.

Bucky honks despondently at the man holding him. Steve just laughs and boops his beak again. Bucky snaps at the hand in exasperation, but that doesn’t do anything; his bite turns out gentle almost against his own wishes. Only almost, though. He still doesn’t want to hurt Steve.

“You’ve got a lot to say today!” Steve says with a grin, and Bucky reconsiders. Steve is an idiot. A delightful idiot, and one that he adores, but an idiot nonetheless.

“I don’t know whether it’s good or bad that this is the most I’ve seen you smile in the past few days. Tapping a swan on the nose,” Sam says. Steve frowns at him, and Bucky took it upon himself to shriek at Sam vengefully. Sam almost jumps; he’s gotten better at not reacting to the loud noises Bucky throws at him.

“It’s just...feast preparations,” Steve says. He looks somewhat constipated at the mere thought of said preparations. His hands smooth at Bucky’s feathers absently, and that seems to help him relax, his shoulders lowering and face loosening.

Sam makes a sympathetic noise. “Still?”

“It’s in a week and everyone’s convincing each other that we won’t have enough food,” Steve grumbles. “I’m trying to dissuade everyone from arranging a hunt.”

Bucky winces, and out of the corner of the eye he can see Sam doing the same as Steve’s shoulders slump further. He does, in fact, remember a few hunts, and every one of them was the same as the last, always ten times longer than they have to be and more of an infuriating exercise in showing off one’s horsemanship and social machinations than a useful restocking of the castle’s pantry.

Steve keeps petting Bucky, making no move to leave even as the sun arches stubbornly, ominously higher in the sky above them. Bucky drapes his neck over his idiot human, and when Steve stands up to go, today he doesn’t let go, clinging stubbornly on with his neck and his wings and his feet. Steve just laughs again, and starts walking with Bucky cradled in his arms.

“Steve?” Sam asks, jumping down from his tree and following, as he always does, a few steps behind. “Uh, Steve?”

“I know,” Steve says. “I’ll drop him off near the edge, won’t I? Hm?” Bucky cooes at him. Sam rolls his eyes, but doesn’t protest further. Things must have been stressful recently, if Sam isn’t taking the opportunity to give Steve shit for something. Bucky makes an unhappy noise and cuddles closer to Steve at the thought, trying to offer what little comfort he can.

The nature of walking means, unfortunately, that they keep getting closer to the castle as they move. When the treeline comes into view, so does the castle in the distance, and even after so many nights pushing through the treelines there’s something about the sight of the austere stone that makes him want to scowl.

“Well, this is goodbye,” Steve says warmly, petting Bucky once more, gentle, and then setting him inexorably on the ground. Bucky bobs his head at the final wave Steve turns to send him, and then watches them go as he always does, watches as they cross the wide green expanse of garden and finally be swallowed up by the castle, small figures against the large doors.

As soon as Steve and Sam disappear into the castle, Bucky’s eyes are drawn as though by force to the windows where he knows Steve’s rooms are. They’re not the right windows - those would be on the other, better-protected side of the castle - but they are generally in the right area, and the sight of them sends what is probably a highly inadvisable idea dancing through Bucky’s mind.


	4. Chapter 4

Steve is jerked rudely out of his sleep by the most unholy thudding noise against his window.

The movements that Bucky drilled into him so long ago kick in, and even as he’s rolling off the bed he slides one hand between the top of his mattress and the headboard for the knife Bucky had insisted he keep there. It’s been a while since he practiced, and he fumbles the grab for one brief moment, but he lands on the balls of his feet with his blade clutched safely in his hand.

The noises that are coming from the window now - some sort of shrieking, mostly, accompanied by weaker thuds and gentle scraping - aren’t as loud as the first noise, but they’re unmistakable signs of someone - some _thing_ \- out there.

Just before Steve can do something stupid, Natasha appears beside him, her hair rumpled and her movements careless. The sight of her like that is enough for Steve to relax before she even gets around to telling him what it is.

“Steve,” she says, “it’s your damn swan.”

“My -” Steve starts to protest, but then he sticks his head up and sees that she’s right, that Bucky’s out on the windowsill with his beak open, making the most awful racket. “What on earth...?” he murmurs, standing.

Natasha unlatches and opens the window carefully, blocking Bucky from coming in with one hand while she surveys the area around the window.

“Is that really necessary?” Steve asks. “It’s B - it’s James. He’s a _swan_ , we’ve been seeing him for weeks.”

“Not here,” Natasha mutters. “You never know.” She must have deemed the surroundings acceptable, though, because she draws her head back inside and opens the window wider for Bucky to come through, which he does with a haughty huff at her before he bounds right up to Steve.

“You scared me,” is all he can think to say to the bird staring up at him. Bucky has that same mischievous glint in his eye that Bucky - that _human_ Bucky - had had. Or maybe Steve was still seeing bits of his Bucky everywhere, in the middle of the night with a yearning, sleep-addled brain.

Bucky honks, and Steve winces; the noise seems far louder in the confines of Steve’s room than it does in the openness of the forest.

“Fucksake,” Nat mutters, switching her grips on the daggers in her hands as she marches back into her alcove. “Tell your fucking swan to pick a daylight hour next time.”

“Bucky, pick a daylight hour next time,” Steve says. The sudden rush of adrenaline from being woken up so suddenly and so strangely is dissipating rapidly. Bucky honks again, the sound piercing through Steve’s sleeping brain, and for whatever reason he finds it necessary to put himself in front of Steve, twining through his legs like he’s one of the cats on the streets and not a bird. “Bucky,” Steve mutters, the third time he nearly trips over his bird on the way back to bed. “Bucky. Stop that.”

Bucky honks again, and Steve points a finger at him “ _Stop_ that.”

If birds could scowl, he’s fairly sure that’s exactly what Bucky would be doing. He stomps his foot at Steve’s words, which seems like strange behaviour for a bird, but Steve can’t reflect on it: in the time that Bucky is preoccupied there is enough time for Steve to dart around him and dive between blissfully warm covers.

Bucky’s alarmed honk once he realises he’s been tricked would be funny if it wasn’t so loud.

“Go to sleep,” Steve tells his swan sternly, and then rolls over to follow his own instructions. When Bucky honks in protest, Steve just groans and drags the covers up over his head.

“I’m going to strangle your swan,” Natashs snaps from her alcove.

“Me too,” Steve mutters. Bucky honks desolately a few more times, the sound bouncing obscenely off the walls, but finally he seems to realise he’s not going to get any cooperation out of Steve and hops onto the bed, burrowing down to join him. It’s a strange sensation, a swan pressed up against Steve’s back, but it makes the bed even warmer and Bucky’s finally stopped yelling, so he’s not about to complain.

~*~

Steve’s wakes up to a rather annoyed Bucky the next morning. Or at least, he wakes up to a Bucky who honks at him and bites him gently on the ear, which he assumes is the swan’s version of annoyance.

“What d’you think he wanted?” Nat asks as Steve stands at the window watching Bucky fly away. She looks far more prepared to face the day than Steve feels. “Your food’s there.”

“Wanted?” Steve asks warily.

Natasha shrugs. “Why come to you now? Why come to you at all?” She flips a knife contemplatively in her free hand as she talks, which is a habit that only mildly unsettles Steve now that he’s had years of watching her do it. “And how did he know which bedroom was yours? I think we’d have heard if people were seeing a giant swan doing reconnaissance.”

“Maybe not if it was in the middle of the night,” Steve mutters, but the more important question is why Bucky would seek him out. Possibly it was that he’d learnt Steve’s schedule and knew that this was one of the days they didn’t meet, but Steve’s trips into the forest were still regular enough that it seems redundant, seems strange that Bucky would want or need to seek him out like this. And he hadn’t tried to get anything - hadn’t even seemed to want anything except for Steve. “I guess we’ll find out what he wanted eventually.”

Natasha shrugs as she follows Steve into his workroom and takes up her customary position by the door. “Don’t jinx it,” she warns.

Steve snorts but, as he comes to realise that night, he did jinx it: that night Bucky returns, beating at his window just as he’s started to drift to sleep.

“Really?” Sam asks, once he’s gotten over his initial alarm. “Really, Steve? How long has this been going on?”

“It only started last night!” Steve protests, but all he gets in response is a sceptical look.

“Sure,” Sam says, neutrally enough that it’s clear Steve isn’t being believed but any further protest would be ground for Sam to assume he’s right anyway. “This is a normal thing for a swan to do.” Bucky honks angrily at the pair of them from where he’s struggling to keep his balance on the thin window ledge.

“ _Really_?” Sam asks again, when Steve heaves himself out of bed and opens the window.

“He won’t leave us alone otherwise,” Steve says defensively.

“I hope you don’t call this leaving us alone,” Sam says, and, well, he has a point: Bucky has taken Steve’s hand in his beak and is by all appearances trying to drag him towards the door.

“...Yes?” Steve tries to say. Bucky lets go of his hand to honk loudly, and then starts pulling again. “Bucky, stop that,” Steve tries, but it’s weak and everyone in the room knows it, including Bucky, who just looks smug as he blithely ignores him.

“Steve,” Sam says. “I don’t want to say this has gone too far, but -”

“Then don’t -”

“This is _going_ too far,” Sam says, in a magnanimous sort of tone that makes it very clear he’s making a compromise. “Swans don’t make pets, Steve.”

Bucky pauses in his efforts to honk angrily at Sam. When he returns to his attempts to pull Steve out of the door he miscalculates and yanks too hard; his feet slip out from under him so that he lands ungracefully on his tailfeathers, legs pumping through the air.

“You’re ridiculous,” Steve says, fond. “Come on, idiot bird.”

“Damn right he’s ridiculous,” Sam mutters as Bucky grumbles but eventually takes his position at Steve’s back once again.

Sam points a finger at Bucky and then at Steve, narrowing his eyes. “I’m watching you,” he says as he settles back in for the night.

~*~

Steve’s not entirely surprised when he’s woken up again in the middle of the night. Bucky’s weight lifts off the bed in one sudden movement that has him leaning up, blinking confusedly as Bucky perches on the floor. “Bucky?”

Bucky cooes at him, a sound that is distinctly more coaxing than anything else he’s let out all night. Steve squints at him suspiciously, and Bucky makes his way over to the door. The handle and lock are both simple enough, true, but Steve’s quite positive that a swan shouldn’t even be able to comprehend them, let alone unlock and open the door. And yet somehow that is exactly what Bucky ends up doing, with two quick motions of his head.

Steve can feel his mouth open and close, but nothing comes out. Bucky stares at him, features unreadable, and makes a beckoning motion with his wing. Steve beckons back, mostly because his sleepy brain thinks it’s the sensible thing to do. Bucky just squints and doesn’t move, although he does have enough mercy to remain quiet while he expresses his displeasure. Steve huddles back into his covers and squints back, which is how the two of them spend several long moments just staring at each other, locked in a strange stalemate.

Bucky starts cooing again, soft, continuing even when Steve rolls over and squeezes his eyes shut. There’s a strange sort of melody in the noises as they go on; as much as he wants to be annoyed he finds, really, that he’s not. And eventually, finally, Bucky gives up again, and climbs onto the bed in the same position as yesterday, snug against Steve’s back.

~*~

The thing is, though, that unlike the previous morning, Bucky doesn’t leave. He just sits at the foot of the bed, staring narrow-eyed at Sam and Steve as they move around each other in the morning. He follows them into the wider working room, sits on Steve’s foot as he reads his daily complaints and writes out his daily letters, and then screeches positively deafeningly when they attempt to convince him that he should stay in Steve’s rooms.

“No - no -” Steve says, as firmly as he can manage while struggling to close a door in the face of an enraged swan. “ _No_. Who knows what people would think of a swan wandering through the castle - who knows what they’d _do_ , everyone’s already mad enough with feast preparations and they may well try to have _you_ as the main course, I won’t allow it -”

“I wouldn’t mind,” Sam mutters. Bucky makes what is possibly the angriest noise Steve has ever heard him make, but - small blessings - his feet slip while he’s concentrating on sounding as angry as possible, and Steve finally manages to slam the door shut.

“That swan is trouble,” Sam says, hands on hips as he stares suspiciously at the doorway, which is rattling and banging under Bucky’s anger.

“Stop patronising him,” Steve says, and sweeps off as dignifiedly as he can manage, slightly smug about having managed to get the better of Bucky.

~*~

Of course, that only lasts as long as the council meeting itself does. The first fresh breath of air that Steve takes when he opens the door is immediately ruined when he chokes on nothing at the sight of Bucky sitting in the hallway.

“Uh,” is all he manages to get out once he’s finished coughing. “B - uh. Sam?”

Bucky looks up at him with what is the most smug expression Steve has ever seen on a bird on his entire life.

“Samuel?” someone echoes from behind him. Lady Hill peers out from behind him and promptly coughs on her own breath in much the same way Steve had done. “Is that a swan?”

“Well - uh, yes,” Steve answers a little helplessly. “I suppose so. I’ve seen him the forest a few times,” he adds hastily. “But I don’t - he seems to have followed -”

“I’ll say he seems to have followed,” Sam grumbles from where he’s leaning against the wall, arms folded tightly. “He popped up and wouldn’t leave.” On closer inspection, he appears to be nursing his arm slightly. Steve raises an eyebrow and gets a scowl for his troubles.

“Well - well, how did it get into the castle?” Coulson sputters. “Are you sure - it’s not a spy, is it?”

“The window,” Sam says, gesturing to the window at the end of the corridor. Bucky sits calmly under the scrutiny of the entirety of the council.

“He’s a swan, Sir Coulson,” Steve says, shifting a little in a transparent attempt to block Bucky from Coulson’s rather worried gaze. “I highly doubt that he’s a spy.”

“I don’t suppose we could do a physical search, could we?” he asks. Bucky glares and flaps his wings, hissing low in his throat as though daring Coulson to do a physical search of him. “Point taken,” Coulson mutters.

“Alright, come on,” Steve says, daring to nudge Bucky with one foot. Bucky glares but allows this indignity, letting himself be shuffled to one side and then scooped up into Steve’s arms. “Let’s go.”

“Go where?” Hill asks.

“To...put him back in the forest,” Steve says. Bucky hisses. “Or somewhere,” he adds. Bucky calms. “This is not permanent,” he tries. Bucky makes a little noise in the back of his throat but, thankfully, does not protest further. His councilors have all raised their eyebrows, but thankfully none of them protest further, either.

“That door really is soundproof, huh?” Sam asks as they make their way down the corridor. Steve frowns, shifting Bucky so that his weight lands mostly on Steve’s hip.

“Well, yeah,” he says. “Don’t tell me -”

“Well, I had to at least try to get rid of him,” Sam protests. “And it clearly didn’t work, so. Besides,” he adds, “I think he’s starting to like me. He didn’t bite _nearly_ as much this time.” Bucky snaps at the words, and Sam just laughs.

Bucky hadn’t protested at the statement that this arrangement isn’t permanent, but he doesn’t make any move to leave, either. He follows Steve around the castle for the rest of the day, in fact, a determined presence that dogs Steve’s footsteps, attracting plenty of strange stares and whispered comments. The only people who seem happy to see him are the cooks whose watercress he’s been eating by the bag, and for them he behaves like an angel.

When night falls, though, a change seems to come over him, just like that. He starts tugging at Steve’s hand again, towards the forest, crooning at him, coaxing him.

“That’s not...bird behaviour,” Clint says, staring at Bucky.

“It’s not?” Steve asks. “I mean, I didn’t think it was. I just - I don’t know. With him - I don’t think he’s a normal bird.”

Clint casts an uneasy glance out at the forest in the distance where it’s pretty clear that Bucky is trying to take Steve. “You don’t think he really is a spy, do you?”

Steve snorts a little; the thought is absurd. “How could a swan be a spy? All this time?”

“Mm,” Clint says, but he still looks doubtful.

“We should see what he wants,” Steve ventures, and Clint’s alarmed look is at once hilarious and disheartening even as Bucky honks his approval and redoubles his attempts to detach Steve’s arm from his body.

“We should _not_ ,” Clint says. “Or at least - I don’t know, do it in daytime with Nat and Sam.”

“But he doesn’t care about the daytime,” Steve says. “He only does this at night.”

“We shouldn’t even - it’s not safe, Steve,” Clint says. Steve holds up his hands.

“All right, of course. You’re right,” he says, and follows him back through the castle despite Bucky’s shrieks of displeasure.

And he intends to remain in his rooms all night, of course he does. He intends wholeheartedly to settle down and have a restful sleep, and to his credit he does manage to hold out for another three nights, through crooning and shrieking and constant pulls on his hand.

But Bucky has a way of barging through whatever Steve wants. This time, unbelievably, he manages to get Seve _off_ his own bed, wrapped in blankets, and he’s halfway out the door dragging Steve behind him when Steve’s cheek goes through a groove on the floor and jars him awake.

“What - _what_ -?”

Bucky coos at him. Then he has the absolute nerve to sit and blink innocently at Steve like he doesn’t know what he’s done.

“ _Bucky_ ,” Steve hisses through what feels like a bag of cotton in his mouth. Bucky blinks, and nudges at Steve’s nearest hand like a cat. “Bucky, you _idiot_ \- you’re not going to let this go, are you?” Bucky shakes his head. Steve stares at him, and then at the mess of blankets around him, and then throws up his hands in defeat.

“All right!” he says, as loudly as he dares. It isn’t very loud, because it’s the middle of the night and he’s still half-asleep and there’s something about the moonlit darkness that compels one to be as quiet as possible. “All right, you asshole, I’m coming, I’m _coming_ -”

He keeps muttering unhappily as he wraps one of the blankets around himself, rubs his eyes and follows Bucky out of his rooms, but he has the feeling that he’s being ignored. “You’re an ass,” Steve tells him, and Bucky only coos, evidently pleased about finally getting his way.

When they reach the throne room Steve comes to a dead stop and stares blankly at Bucky. It’s impossible that he could know about the passage behind the throne that’s meant to act as an emergency exit when needed, but - that’s exactly what it seems like. That’s exactly where he stands, still cooing at Steve. 

“How did you know about this?” he asks, crossing his arms and narrowing his eyes. Bucky only keeps cooing, and makes a gesture that is pretty clearly telling Steve to use his opposable thumbs to open the door and walk through it. Steve should probably be more concerned than he is - it’s looking more and more as though Bucky is not just a bird - but somehow, for some reason, he just isn’t.

“You’d better not be a spy, you little - oh, shit,” Steve says as the door closes behind him. “I don’t have my guard. Bucky!”

Bucky coos again, a little louder now that they’re properly alone. Steve points a reproving finger at him and gets only an affectionate snap in response.

“You’re a bird and I shouldn’t trust you,” he says. Because it’s true: he does trust Bucky, far more than one should trust a bird, and Bucky is a bird, no matter how much he might resemble a human in temperament and characteristics. Steve shouldn’t be following a bird into a forest late at night, of all things, because his guard are right: that’s the sort of thing people can train a bird to do, to lead Steve into a trap. And still, here he is.

He wishes he could understand why he trusts Bucky so much. Why he is doing this, even when everything says he probably - definitely - shouldn’t.

Finally he just sighs and shrugs at Bucky, at his bright hopeful eyes. “Lead on, I suppose,” he says resignedly, and follows Bucky as he turns and navigates through the almost pitch-blackness of the tunnel.

The passageway comes out just inside the forest, the better to hide Steve if he ever finds himself needing to use it. It means that when they exit the passage Steve’s vision is dominated by shadows, enough that his swan almost seems to disappear in the darkness; it makes the effect of the occasional rays of moonlight on his feathers even more eerie, as though he’s built from disembodied pieces. They’re making noise as they walk, leaves crackling quietly underfoot, but at the same time, somehow, it feels utterly silent, and the last thing that Steve wants is to make a noise. As though making a noise would ruin everything. The idea is absurd, but still - his mouth stays shut, and his feet move carefully.

As they go deeper into the forest Steve feels the curious sensation of everything growing more dreamlike around him: that he’s walking through the forest in the middle of the night at all, much less that he is following a swan, that he is wearing clothes for sleeping in and socks that are no match for the forest floor and clutching a blanket around him like a sorcerer in robes.

It’s hard to navigate the forest by night, but Steve is entirely unsurprised when Bucky leads them out of the trees to the banks of the lake. They couldn’t have ended up anywhere else.

Bucky murmurs and turns to stare at Steve, neck straight and tense, wings tight against his sides, and if he didn’t know better Steve would call his swan nervous.

“What is it?” he finally asks, and the silence between them sways and breaks. Bucky blinks at him as though waking from a trance. With one last glance at Steve he steps further away, down to the lake. Moonlight drifts over all of him at once, finally, as he breaks out of the shadows of the trees.

He’s beautiful, Steve thinks, watching him approach the lake, gilded silver. And then his swan reaches out and there’s this - this blur in the air, like reality itself isn’t quite sure of what should be there, and Steve thinks that he sees - the shadows of feathers, scattered in the wind, and then there’s a body sprawled out on the ground in front of Steve, a body he _knows_ deep in him, in his sou. Disbelief spreads through him, numbs him down to the marrow of his bones.

“...Bucky?”

It’s a whisper forced through unfeeling lips, but it’s real. The sound is real. The figure at his feet rolls over with a slight groan to lie on his back, and then he grins up at Steve, that achingly familiar curve he hasn’t seen for so long. The light loves him, catching at his teeth, at the whites of his eyes, until he seems almost to glow.

“Yeah,” Bucky says. “S’me, Steve.”

“Oh my - oh, fuck, _Bucky_ ,” Steve gasps, falls suddenly to his knees and then even further to sit on the ground. A branch digs into his spine and he doesn’t care.

“Well, I don’t see why you’re so surprised,” Bucky says, that familiar smile on his face wavering just a little. The look in his eyes is heartbreaking; it makes Steve’s chest ache. “It’s not like you haven’t been calling me _Bucky_ these last few weeks -”

“Oh - oh, no,” Steve chokes out, perilously close to tears or laughter or possibly both. “I’ve - oh, no, I’ve been an idiot. I’ve -” He stutters to a stop, not sure how to end that sentence, not even sure if he can. He reaches for Bucky almost compulsively, and Bucky reaches back, his eyes tracking Steve’s reaching hand.

His fingers are warm when Steve reaches them, and the touch feels enormous, momentous, for all that it’s such a small thing. Bucky’s fingers intertwine with his, so gentle, and Steve swears he can feel the reverberations of Bucky’s heartbeat through their linked hands.

“You’re -” Steve can’t bring himself to finish the sentence. He’s terrified that saying it will reveal it to be a lie, all of a sudden, the fear of it clenching around his heart like a vice.

Bucky squeezes Steve’s hand, and abruptly Steve can breathe easier. “I’m here,” Bucky says. “I’m _here_.”

  


He does a good job of being confident with it. Steve would almost believe him until he tries to smile again, and Steve can see the slight wobble in it, the desperation that comes through the curl of his fingers.

“Yeah,” Steve says, a little wobbly himself. “Yeah, you’re here.” This time it’s his hand that clenches, reassuring. Bucky meets Steve’s gaze directly, and Steve is lost. He’s not quite sure when the simple touch of their hands moves to something more, but that’s fine, that’s good, even, because they’re taking full advantage of their proximity to each other now, reaching out and grabbing greedily like every warm point of contact is going to be their last. Steve’s hand slides from Bucky’s chest to his shoulder only to go back to his chest, disjointed and frantic and afraid.

“I’m here, I’m here, I’m here,” Bucky murmurs, the words ghosting against Steve’s neck, plea and confirmation and reassurance all at once.

“We’re here,” Steve corrects him, gripping tighter, and Bucky lets out a wet little laugh at it.

“We are at that,” he agrees. “Yeah, you idiot.” His arms squeeze tighter around Steve.

“M’not an idiot,” Steve protests, but it’s halfhearted at best.

“Making friends with bad-tempered birds, following a bird into the forest at midnight, without any guard -”

“Oh, I suppose I dragged myself out of bed,” Steve protests. “You -”

“Oh, and I suppose I forced you to follow me without going back to wake Clint up,” Bucky says, and even though his chin is hooked over Steve’s shoulder Steve can feel him rolling his eyes.

“I don’t even see why you’re quibbling about this,” Steve says, very glad that Bucky isn’t in any position to see his face, because he’s blushing rather fiercely at the thought of having to admit he’d clear forgotten about his guard. “It got us here, didn’t it?”

They finally pull away from each other, but neither of them can stand to go far; they shuffle for a few moments and end up curled into one another, arms and legs tangled.

“It did,” Bucky admits, picking up the thread of conversation again like there’d never been a pause. “But I’d rather it’d gotten us here with more guards, and you a little safer.”

“You’re no danger to me.”

“But I could’ve been,” Bucky says grumpily, which is just - his typical worrying self.

“Sure,” Steve says, and he’s sure his indulgent smile is audible as he talks. It’s not as though he’s trying particularly hard to suppress it. “Of course, you could’ve been.”

Bucky sighs and presses his mouth against Steve’s upper arm, which happens to have the good fortune to be next to his face. “I wouldn’t hurt you, but I wish you’d be more careful.”

“I knew you wouldn’t hurt me,” Steve says quietly. “You might - you weren’t you, but I knew.” He can feel Bucky’s sigh at the words, thrills quietly at the way Bucky turns his head inwards to press into Steve’s shoulder. “Will you tell me what happened?” he asks quietly, when Bucky doesn’t protest further. “Why you were - well -”

“A bird,” Bucky says, a bitter twist to his mouth as he says it. “Steve, I haven’t a clue.”

Steve frowns, pulls back, disbelieving and a little scared of what this might mean. “What do you mean? How can you not know?”

“Hey, I don’t know, okay?” Bucky says. “I just don’t remember. I -” He frowns, but even as he’s trying to remember he shakes his head. Steve feels that familiar urge to smooth out the wrinkles - and now, because he can, he does, revelling the feeling of Bucky warm underneath his fingertips, of Bucky alive and well and pressing into his touch. “I remember - the Queen growing more forgetful. You were all anxious and high-strung about it. About being more than an heir. You were going to call on the Martinelli family.” A fleeting smile crosses his lips. “You didn’t take a guard, as a gesture of good faith.”

“Forgive me,” Steve says. “I thought the risk was all mine. I never dreamed that you’d be the one -”

“I don’t think anybody did,” Bucky says softly. “There’s nothing to forgive.”

Steve has to clamp his mouth shut against the retorts that want to spill out of his mouth, at that. “But - after that?” he asks instead, and Bucky shakes his head, his face open and regretful.

“No,” he says. “Not a thing. It’s all a blur. I must have been inside the castle, because the next thing I remember is flying out of it. But in between that and then -” He shrugs helplessly.

“You don’t think it could have been an accident?” Steve asks wistfully. That would be the simplest solution of all, so of course Bucky has to snort and shake his head.

“Fuck, can you imagine what it’d be like if you were the kind of person who went around turning people into swans by accident?” he asks, and to his credit he makes it most of the way through sentence without laughing.

“Oh, stop that,” Steve mutters, fighting a smile of his own. “How do you always find a way to derail serious conversations?”

“You’re the one who suggested someone turned me into a swan by _accident_ ,” Bucky says indignantly.

“And I regret it already,” Steve assures him. Bucky snorts and stretches his legs, the smile leaving his face.

“I just can’t figure out why,” he says. “Why me? Why not do anything to you while you were being an idiot about your guard? I don’t,” he shifts, his hands running through the dirt agitatedly. “I don’t know. I don’t like it.”

“You’re a worrier,” Steve says, but it’s not a rebuttal.

“There’ve been no attempts on your life?” Bucky asks.

“No,” Steve says. “Sorry to disappoint.” Bucky smacks him lightly, which is fair enough. Steve revels in it, in the absolute improperness of having someone unafraid to break the protocols that dictate every other interaction he has. Clint and Nat and Sam are wonderful, are similarly informal with him after enough coaxing, but they have always been knights first and anything else second. Bucky, though - Bucky has always been more friend than knight.

“You’ll keep Sam and Nat and Clint with you?” Bucky - asks, almost, except that it’s not quite asking and not quite a statement. Somewhere in between, a little pleading. His hands are fisted in Steve’s shirt. “Promise me. You’ve been such an idiot about coming into the forest.”

Steve scoffs, but he doesn’t open his mouth to argue the point because he knows it’s an argument he’ll lose. “Yes,” he says instead. “I’ll keep them near me.”

Bucky lets out a little sigh, lets go of Steve, smooths out the creases tha he’s made. “Good,” he murmurs. “Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me yet,” Steve teases, grinning and twisting away when he’s pinched on the side.

“You’re an idiot,” Bucky grumbles, and Steve really can’t help the way that he grabs at Bucky’s hand at hearing those familiar words again.

“I can’t believe it’s you,” he says. “I can’t believe you’re here. And you - I’ve been calling you _Bucky_ this whole _time_ -”

“Oh, believe me, I know,” Bucky says, rolling his eyes so hard that his head moves with the motion.

“No wonder you were so grumpy,” Steve mutters.

To his surprise, Bucky laughs, and then punches him in the arm again. “I shouldn’t’ve expected anything else. You’re such an idiot. I was trying _so hard_ -”

“In my defence -”

“Oh, don’t -”

“ _In my defence_ , it’s not as though it’s a normal thing, to assume a swan is secretly a person,” Steve protests. “Oh, here’s a swan who reminds me of Bucky, he must _be_ Bucky - I might be an idiot, but I’m not that idiotic.”

“So what I needed was for you to be more of an idiot than you already are,” Bucky says, slanting a look up at Steve. “Hard to believe that’s possible, really.”

“Like you’re not the one with all the stupid between the two of us,” Steve scoffs, old familiar words that have long since lost their sting. He’s not sure they ever had one. He squeezes Bucky’s hand a little tighter, tubbing a thumb over prominent knuckles. “Will you come back to the castle with me? I find,” he adds quietly, deliberately, “that I’m missing my bed.”

The words make Bucky pause, make him look up at Steve from below his lashes, because the implication - _with you in it_ \- hangs between them. The two of them have been dancing around each other forever, for eons, because it’s neither appropriate nor necessarily safe for a guard to be constantly distracted by their ward, but Steve finds that this disappearance, this miraculous reappearance, has him wanting. He doesn’t want to feel that bone-deep regret again, not over Bucky.

Bucky mirrors Steve’s movements, rubbing a thumb across the inside of Steve’s palm, the gentle roughness of his calluses a sweetly familiar sensation. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to disappoint you,” he says in a voice that hints at his old drawl. “I turn back into a swan at the treeline,” he adds, before Steve has time to jump to conclusions.

He sighs and flops backwards. “You would,” he mutters. “Of course it works out like that.”

Bucky shrugs. “You’re right, though,” he says. “We should go back. You still need your beauty sleep.”

Steve blows out a sigh. “I guess I do,” he says morosely. Somehow the idea of heading back to bed is much less appealing now.

“C’mon,” Bucky says. “Your eyes are drooping, I can see it. I’ll walk you back.”

“What’ll you do?” Steve asks, even as he stands and brushes himself off.

“I don’t know,” Bucky says. “The castle’s particularly good for a swan, but, you know, you’re there. Then again, I’ve been getting some scary looks from the cooks. I think you might’ve been right about people going mad with feast preparation.”

“I’ll miss you,” Seve says, and he’ll blame his tiredness if his voice comes out a little more forlorn than he intends it to. Bucky hesitates for a moment.

“I’ll stay if you want,” he says. “I didn’t think - I mean, I didn’t know if it’d make a difference, really. It’s not even as though I can do any snooping around, given - well, that I’m -”

“No, no, you’re probably right,” Steve says. “Maybe when it’s safer for you. For swans, I mean.”

“Unfortunately for you, swan is edible all year round,” Bucky drawls.

Steve scowls, smacks him. “Don’t even joke about that,” he snaps.” “I’ll ask Sorcerer Strange if he can do anything for us. If I brought you to him -? If anyone can at least tell us how to get rid of this thing it’ll be him.” He’s standing in front of Bucky and clutching both of his hands, like they’re in a melodrama. He coughs a little and tries to step away, only to be foiled when Bucky tugs him closer.

“Okay,” he says, with that lovely smile. “I’m not going anywhere.”

He walks Steve back to the castle, as promised, escorting him as he always does - a knight is meant to stay two steps behind and slightly to the left of his guard, but Bucky is unorthodox, has always stayed close enough that they could bump shoulders whenever either of them please, and much to Steve’s pleasure he does exactly the same this time. The silence between them is slow and comfortable, a well-worn piece of clothing.

“Good -” Steve starts once he reaches the edge of the forest, but Bucky only scoffs and hops across the invisible boundary line. His shape grows more and more strange and vague, the sight oddly nauseating, and the abruptly a swan tumbles out of the messy nothing blur and the roiling in Steve’s stomach stops, just like that.

“Bucky?” he asks, disquiet creeping down his spine. The way the swan tips his head and glares goes a long way to ease that, and Bucky’s loud, derisive snort goes so far as to pull a smile out of Steve. “All right, point taken.”

Bucky settles once again, and pointedly begins shepherding Steve towards the castle, even goes so far as to rearrange the blankets on the bed and wrap Steve up securely before squeezing himself through the window with a final wave and wag of his tailfeathers.

~*~

“Steve,” Clint says very seriously. When Steve blinks open his eyes he sees his guard standing next to his bed with his arms folded and a frown on his face.

“We need to talk about this.”

Steve winces; of course he wouldn’t have been dragged out and gotten back into the room without Clint noticing. “I know,” he sighs. “I won’t go out again without you, but - Clint, I’m so glad Bucky dragged me out of bed, you’ll never believe - um.” He stutters to a stop when he sees the way Clint’s mouth has swung open and his eyebrows creeped up his forehead.

“I was just...talking about the window,” Clint says sort of helplessly, gesturing at the window beside him which, Steve realises belatedly, is still open.

“Oh,” he says uncomfortably. “Um.”

“You went out?” Clint asks incredulously after a pause, and then the questions come thick and fast. “At _night_? Where? _Bucky_ \- the swan? I’ve fallen for a lot in my life, but I don’t believe that a swan’s strong enough to carry you anywhere.”

“Well, it’s true,” Steve says a little indignantly.

“You didn’t have to go with him,” Clint scolds. That’s also true.

“I’m so glad I did, though,” Steve murmurs, and if he sounds euphoric it’s because he is. He grabs Clint’s nearest wrist, gripping perhaps a little too tightly and unable to care. “Clint, he’s _Bucky_.”

“I know,” Clint says uncomfortably, giving a few testing tugs on his wrist. “You named him after Bucky, which is - well, it’s a bit - you know -”

“No, you don’t understand,” Steve says. “He _is_ Bucky.”

Clint stills entirely, eyes going wide and disbelieving. “ _Our_ Bucky?”

“Yes!” Steve exclaims. “Our Bucky. We went out to the lake, and when he touched the water - I don’t know, Clint, I can’t explain it, but it was him, I’m sure of it.”

Clint sits down heavily enough that the bed squeaks in protest, but he doesn’t even blink an eye. “Well, fuck,” he mutters. “He was a swan?” He shakes his head. “Our Bucky. A swan.”

“We have to tell Sam and Nat, too,” Steve says, standing, far more energetic than he usually is at this hour.

“Ugh,” Sam says once he and Nat have been dragged up to Steve’s rooms and the news has been told to them in a hushed, excited whisper by a practically vibrating Steve. “Really? That’s why he’s such an asshole, I guess. We are gonna have words once he gets back.”

The words strike at something in Steve, make him pause. _Get back_. He’s found Bucky and he knows a man who can help; there’s no reason why Bucky shouldn’t come back, in the next few days in the best case scenario. He’d known, and he hadn’t dared let himself hope, but here it is in concrete words: Bucky’s going to get back, and Sam is going to have a talk with him.

“Sure,” he says, with a grin that is far too wide to fit on his face but tries its best anyway. “That sounds fine.” Sam shakes his head, but he’s grinning as well. Natasha has a small, relieved smile on her face, and for several long moments the four of them just stand there grinning stupidly at each other, because Bucky is coming back.

“Bring us to see him,” Nat is the one to say. “Tonight.”

Steve nods. “He’ll be glad to see us, I know he will. And I’ll write to Sorcerer Strange and see if he’ll accompany us, or visit if I have the time - and we’ll bring Bucky back. We’ll bring him home.”

~*~

Steve shouldn’t have spoken so soon.

Sorcerer Strange had replied rather promptly to Steve’s letter and said that he’d be more than glad to have Bucky brought to him in a few days, and so Steve is here to both pass that along and let Nat and Sam see Bucky for themselves.

The night is grey and overcast, and the forest is rendered mostly in flat greys because of it. When he doesn’t see Bucky, he just assumes that he’s found a particularly camouflaged place to sleep.

The third time he calls Bucky’s name, anxiety is making its inexorable way through his body, scraping through his veins until ehe feels hollow. Sam and Clint start shifting uncomfortably, and Nat holds herself utterly still in that way she does when she’s uncomfortable.

“Bucky?” Steve calls for a fourth time, more desperate than he wants to admit to being. Something rustles beneath someone’s foot behind him, and he whirls around. “He was here,” he says to his guards. “Last night. He was. I’m not - I don’t -”

“Well, of course he was,” Nat says, and Steve can’t quite tell whether she believes him or not.

“Then why isn’t he _here_?” Steve asks, and nobody can answer him.

They split up and search the shores of the lake, but before they even start Steve can tell they all think it’s useless, a wasted effort. And they’re right; when they reconvene, their hands are empty, shoulders slumped, eyes disappointed. Bucky is nowhere to be found.


	5. Chapter 5

Bucky wakes up with a pounding head and coldness next to him, below him, seeping into his body. His entire body throbs, confused, nothing more than a vague blob in his mind - he doesn’t know what he is, swan or man or something else entirely, mutating into something new and horrifying. He doesn’t know what’s happening, doesn’t know where he is. When he tries to move his head the throbbing pain that follows tears a pained noise from his throat; when he tries to open his eyes all he can see is blinding whiteness. He moans and squeezes his eyes shut again, stuffs his head into the ground in an attempt to force himself back to sleep.

It doesn’t work; if anything, the lack of one sense only heightens the others. Bucky opens his eyes again and groans, pressing his face into cool metal to try and calm his brain down. His harsh breathing starts to even out, and then the very ground shakes and moves under him and his heartrate kicks right back up again.

He squeezes his eyes shut again and breathes. In, out.

When he dares to open his eyes again, the movement of the surroundings still makes his eyes hurt, but he fixes his eyes on the bars directly in front of him and it’s not so bad.

Bars, he thinks. Bars. He’s in a cage. Beyond the cage is the forest, and beyond the forest is the castle. Breathe in, breathe out. The lock looks as though it’s glowing. He breathes in and doesn’t touch, doesn’t touch, doesn’t touch. When he breathes out, it looks a little less luminous. Perhaps it was the sun. Perhaps it was just his confused swimming eyes. Perhaps it was nothing at all.

He breathes out, and slumps down with the exhale like the air was all that was keeping him steady. The cold metal of the cage base is getting through his feathers, is leeching the warmth from his body, and he can’t bring himself to move, not quite yet. He’ll move in a moment, and teach these men a lesson for taking him away from the lake, for taking him away from _Steve_ -

Steve. He has to get to Steve. The thought is enough to have him struggling upwards when the cold harshness of the cage floor hadn’t been, but the effort is useless anyway; it isn’t even a moment before his wings give out, and he slumps.

~*~

The next time he manages to drag his eyes open it’s to the banging of an opening door, and there are two unfamiliar faces above him as he’s manoeuvred through a narrow doorway. Both of them are trying not to glance down furtively, and only one of them is having any sort of success. Their faces are intersected by bars.

“Good. In there,” a familiar voice says. Bucky knows that voice, but he can’t for the life of him place it; when he turns his head to see who it is, it feels as though he’s moving through honey, slow and ponderous. He can’t keep up as the cage is moved into another room and placed heavily on the ground.

The two men hover at the doorway, staring at someone Bucky can’t see. The two rooms are silent for a moment until that same familiar voice says, impatient, “You can go now.” The two men move out of Bucky’s sight, and a door slams shut; Bucky’s left to look at an empty doorway with dread curling in his stomach.

“Well?” a second voice asks, his impatience only thinly veiled. There are footsteps, and Bucky turns his head in time to see a distinguished-looking older man with grey in his temples pace past the open doorway, once and twice. Bucky’s eyes flick over the man, and his heart goes cold in his chest.

“You know what to do,” Alexander Pierce answers.

“Good,” the other man huffs, but Bucky barely hears him. Blood is roaring through his ears, tiny little memories tumbling, fitting into place, too little too late. Alexander _Pierce_ \- he hates himself, a little, for ever forgetting what had happened to him, even when he’d been bespelled to do so. He’s so fixated on Pierce that he doesn’t see anything of the other man aside from a vague impression of dark hair and a fighter’s build. The sound of the door slamming shut rings through both rooms, makes Bucky’s head throb.

Pierce’s cold eyes shift back to Bucky. Even those few seconds of his gaze makes Bucky hyper-aware that he’s a swan, that he’s trapped, that he can’t see a way of getting out of this situation. The room is bare and empty, dim, vaguely damp, and possesses all the hallmarks of being underground. There are no windows to escape from this time.

Bucky can only watch as Pierce leans forward to close the door in front of Bucky with a clinical sort of click, with all the control that the other man hadn’t used. Rage scrapes through his veins, painful and unforgiving.

His head still swims, but he staggers to his feet and flops against the metal around him. The cage is big enough that he can stretch his wings out and just be brushing either side, but the gaps between the bars and columns is small enough that a child’s hand wouldn’t fit through them. He doesn’t have a hope of escaping.

Very gently, he wedges his beak into one of the square gaps, tilting his head sideways to be able to fit, and then whatever they used to get him into the cage so easily swims over his mind once more. He makes a few useless movements, and then he slumps yet again. He’d be furious at being rendered so useless if he wasn’t so _tired_.

~*~

He sleeps. He wakes up and batters himself to pieces on the bars of the cage in front of him, and then he sleeps again, rinse and repeat. Time passes alarmingly hazily in a dark windowless room, alone, possibly under the lingering influence of some spell or drug. It leaves a lot of opportunity to work up an all-encompassing haze of anxiety, which is promptly what Bucky’s mind decides to do, and there is no shortage of things to be anxious about: how powerful Alexander Pierce is in the castle, how powerful he is out of it, with his own lands and holdings. How close he is to Steve.

It’s probably natural enough that Bucky’s anxious mind is constantly circling back to his previous kidnapping, trying to tease out the whys and wherefores and hows of it, that nebulous time in between Steve’s departure to do the rounds of the noble houses and the moment he squeezed himself out of a window and _flew_. The more he thinks about it, the more aggressively a headache builds behind his eyes, so responsive and so splitting that it cannot be natural. Bucky just grits his teeth and focuses harder; he’s spent too much time with Steve not to be his own brand of stubborn.

It doesn’t take long at all for the splitting headache to turn into something truly agonising, something that has Bucky flopping down on the ground again because he doesn’t think he can move through the pain throbbing through his temples, his head, his skull. He’s barely able to hold onto the image of Pierce in his mind, but - well, maybe he’s got no sense left in him, or maybe he just can’t do anything else, but all he knows is that he doesn’t stop poking at that open wound in his head. He’s flayed open and pinned down and wriggling but Pierce is the key to everything, he knows it - if he could just remember - if this headache could just _stop_ -

He doesn’t know how long he lies there, his teeth dug so deep into this mission of his that he couldn’t have stopped trying if he’d wanted to. He thinks someone comes in; he thinks perhaps he eats something, mechanical. But after an indeterminate hazy amount of time, something indefinable snaps, cracks. The sensation of breaking is paradoxically gentle and all the sweeter for it. Memories start to filter through his mind; not those of before, tiny fragments of things that were only enough to piece together a vague image, but whole, rich sequences.

For a moment he’s triumphant: he remembers. He remembers despite everything, despite their efforts to make sure he wouldn’t, he’s frustrated Pierce by escaping and then by sticking around, by making contact with Steve again. They’d reassure themselves by turning him into an anima when he tried to escape, but he’d slowly broken even that with the lake at night. All of those factors are only going to bring him more grief now, but he can’t be anything but spitefully glad about it.

Just as quickly as that satisfaction builds, it trickles away to be replaced by a slow sort of horror and self-castigation. He’d _forgotten_ that Pierce was behind everything, forgotten how he’d stood with arms folded as his reluctant assistant threw red spell after red spell at Bucky’s pinned-down form, forgotten how his eager assistant had performed his experiments with poking and electric prodding and blood samples and skin samples until they could cast a spell that would make him forget. If he thinks about it he can still feel a shadow of that spell against his temples, and it makes him shudder even now. 

Worse - possibly the worst thing - was that he’d gotten out and given Steve hope, had shown him he was still alive without managing to pass along any useful information, and - and now that was going to just about drive Steve out of his mind with worry. All of this, the long weeks of slow realisation, the way he’d reminded Steve so pointedly of Bucky, it was nothing more than taking a knife embedded in a wound and twisting it. It was worse than the original clean break of a mysterious disappearance.

He slumps. He’s thinking like he’s already lost and he knows it. He can’t drag himself out of it, and he knows that, too.

~*~

The next time he wakes up his head is, thankfully, far clearer, even if the rest of his body aches rather terribly from being sprawled ungracefully across the ground. He manages to drag himself up and shake most of the soreness out of his limbs, and as soon as he is somewhat able to move he does the foolish thing and throws himself at the bars, adrenaline surging. He wants to get out: is that so much to ask for?

Apparently it is, he thinks bitterly as he beats at the cage. He’s strong, he knows he is; he can hold his own in a fight, as a human or as a swan, but nobody would be able to tell for all that he achieves, swiping uselessly at the metal around him, caging him in.

He screeches, angry and despairing and desperate, his heart racing in his chest and thundering in his ears. He swears he can feel it beating against his ribs; he swears it’d fly right out of him, if it could. It’d escape like he wants to.

When he finally falls silent, the bars around him are just as immovable as they’d been when he woke up. More, even, because now even the lingering hope he’d felt when he’d opened his eyes was gone. He hadn’t even known it was there until it was gone.

In the resounding silence, the door in front of him opens and a small, dark-haired woman with a scowl on her face sticks her head inside the room. He even recognises her: the hesitant assistant who’d stood beside Pierce and thrown spells at his command. Pierce had called her Wanda in a fatherly tone, and Maximoff much more coldly when he wasn’t quite pleased; nobody else had used her name unless they’d had to.

“Stop it,” she says coldly. Of course that only makes Bucky screech at her again, but she should have known that would happen. She scowls at him harder, and Bucky is angry and reckless enough that he throws himself against the cage at her, and this time there’s enough force in it that he nearly topples the thing right over, the bottom lifting perilously upwards.

Maximoff waves her fingers, and the red magic that flows out of the slams the base of the cage back against the ground with enough force that it knows Bucky backwards.

“Stop it or I’ll make you stop it,” she snaps. “Nobody can hear you anyway.” She slams the door shut again, and Bucky screeches after her, as loud as he can. It’s not very loud, since his throat is starting to protest, but it’s the thought that counts, and he’s quite sure she’ll appreciate that.

~*~

Maximoff is, as it turns out, saddled with the tasks of feeding, watering, and generally keeping Bucky alive. Neither of them are particularly pleased about it; Wanda shoves his assorted greens and browns at him with about as much enthusiasm as he eats it. The cage opens up for her, a brief hole opening enough that Bucky’s food can be dropped through it, and every time he tries to take advantage of the brief opening he’s stung, a sensation like a static shock zipping unhappily through his beak and head.

Most of the time he hisses at her when she comes in, and he feels like that’s perfectly reasonable given the circumstances. It’s not as though she ever responds to him. Sometimes, though, he will make more coaxing noises at her, and those are the times when she will clench her jaw and avoid his eyes, when she comes closest to responding to him. But whatever he tries, she never opens her mouth; she comes in silently and leaves silently, even her footsteps strangely muted against the stone.

The silence leaves him far too much time to himself, to think about his situation, about Steve, about Pierce. About how Steve must be reacting to his sudden disappearance yet again, and this time not able to tell anyone about it, because who would believe that a man had been turned into a swan? About what Pierce might be doing to Steve, while he’s in the throes of anxiety and grief. The only reassurance that either of them have is their bond, and that is not particularly reassuring.

Ironically enough, it’s when he gives up that Wanda talks to him. When he finally ignores her coming in, his head folded pointedly back against his back, that’s when she speaks to him. “You shouldn’t have come back,” she says softly, in her light, sad voice.

The bars of the cage aren’t big enough to accommodate even a child’s hand, had barely been big enough for Bucky beak to fit through, but the metal seems to melt around Wanda’s hand as she reaches in and pets his neck, so gentle. He feels like he should snap at her, but he doesn’t, and her next sigh is a little wobbly.

“You should have left,” she says as Bucky finally moves enough to glare balefully at her. “I made it so you’d want to leave. You should have left.”

Bucky hisses lowly, more to himself than at her. It’s really - well, it’s not quite fair, because she has not been the most eager participant and it doesn’t seem like she’s here of her own free will, unlike Pierce and Zole, but without her magic there wouldn’t have been a way to turn him into a swan. He wouldn’t _be_ here.

Wanda withdraws her hand, and the metal of the cage closes back up seamlessly. When Bucky pecks at it there’s no yield in the metal, and Wanda smiles at him sadly. Stunningly, neither that nor the quiet, “Sorry,” she leaves him with makes him feel particularly better about his entire situation.

~*~

Still, now that he’s no longer levelling his anger directly at her, she begins spending more time with him - first in the same room and then leaning against his cage, silent but undeniably there. It’s a move that’s entirely too trusting, but she’s so shy about it, so lonely-looking that Bucky can’t bring himself to take advantage of it. It’s hard to be _angry_ with her in the face of that.

Besides which, if the slow, unwilling way she follows Pierce’s instructions wasn’t demonstrative enough the way she is confined to the same rooms that Bucky is - well, it says something, he thinks.

“I’m not allowed to change you back to a human,” is the first thing she tells him, curled in on herself as she leans against the cage bars and watches him do nothing as he watches her do nothing. “They’re afraid you might convince me to let you go. They’re probably right,” she adds morosely. Thin red lines spread out across the floor where she’s tracing the stone.

Bucky sighs. Just that noise has Wanda stiffening, her eyes widening a little; there’s panic in them. It’s not hard to deduce that she has probably said something she wasn’t meant to, perhaps something she didn’t intend. It’s enough to have her scrambling over to the other side of the room, as though the extra distance will make her words all right.

Bucky cooes at her gently; not coaxing, just comforting. She stares at him warily, but relaxes against the wall. She doesn’t leave.

~*~

Their first interruption only makes it ever more clear that Wanda is not with Pierce in the same way Zola is, in the same way Bucky was - _is_ \- with Steve. When the outer door bursts open loudly enough that it’s audible from where the two of them are sitting, she scrambles to her feet, wipes her hands compulsively on her skirt.

“Hey,” a voice says, and then louder, “Hey! Maximoff!” It is recognisable as the voice of the man beside Pierce earlier, and those suspicions are only confirmed when the door in front of Bucky swings open and the man himself peers in, clearly looking for Wanda and beckoning her angrily when he sees her. He’s not someone Bucky knows personally, but he does recognise the man as the head of Pierce’s guard; they bump into each other as they wait for their respective charges to exit council meetings, but Bucky has never been particularly interested in striking up a friendship. He knows the man’s last name is Rumlow, but the first name utterly escapes him.

“What?” Wanda asks. Her fists are clenched behind her skirt; they’re trembling, ever so slightly, but Rumlow can’t see that. Bucky can. “What is it?”

“About time,” Rumlow mutters, slamming the door shut behind him so hard that it bounces back open to offer Bucky a view of what’s going on. “I need your -” He wiggles his hands. “There’s a problem in the forest that needs solving.”

“Oh,” Wanda says, and Bucky narrows his eyes a little at her flat tone, hoping that the problem isn’t what he thinks it is. “You know I can’t do magic on dead bodies,” she says, and confirms Bucky’s suspicions.

“You’ve said it plenty of times, doll,” Rumlow says darkly. “I just need some dirt lifted, that’s all.”

“You -”

“It’s winter,” he interrupts flatly.

“All right,” Wanda says, as rebellious as Bucky’s ever heard her.

“All _right_ ,” Rumlow repeats, and the door slams again as he drags her out of the room.

~*~

“He’s a brute,” Wanda mutters to him once Rumlow has slammed his way out of their rooms. It’s the most rebellious Bucky’s ever seen her, and he’s a little fascinated at the sight. She scowls darkly, and red winds through her fingers. “I hate -”

She chokes on the word, though, and stops herself there, fists clenching again. Bucky just gazes at her, and she stares back, a thousand tiny different emotions in her eyes.

He doesn’t know what he expects. She’s pent-up and frustrated and that she’s probably going to do something unwise is a given, but he’s still shocked when she waves her hands and the bars of his cage melt away, when that blurring sensation overtakes him and he’s sprawled, human, across the floor.

“I thought you weren’t supposed to do that,” he says. Besides the fact that she’s not supposed to, it is objectively a rather stupid move: he could overpower her easily enough, could knock her in the head and dive for the door because she has a guard down, even with the nebulous threat of magic on her side. Wanda’s face twists.

“Don’t make me regret it,” she says lowly.

Bucky shrugs expansively and she looks away, fingering one of the amulets around her neck. He watches her for a moment, watches her fidget, and then she is the one, unexpectedly, to broach a new topic of conversation.

“Tell me about the King,” she says abruptly.

For all that she might be a reluctant helper, she still helps Pierce, and Bucky doesn’t want to give potentially tactical information on Steve to her. So when he answers her question it’s through his lens: he tells her the most harmless things he can think of, the way he looks in the rain, that angry-kitten look he got when he was smaller, their early days of being playmates when Bucky was just one of the village boys and Steve was just the son of one of the castle nurses. Wanda closes her eyes as she listens, leans her head back against the wall as though she wants to immerse herself wholly in the tales that Bucky tells.

Day after day, she asks questions, not just about Steve but about Bucky, about life in the castles: how the kitchens work, how the herbalists and healers gather and preserve their stocks. Quiet things, calm things. She never offers stories of her own, but some of the things she asks about - well, Bucky gets the impression that her stories would not necessarily be calm or quiet. She is a little skittish and quiet, still, but she relaxes a little more with every conversation they have, every question that he answers uncomplainingly. And if Bucky watches her as he talks, tries to gauge when to push for his own release, throws hints of how good it is to be free and doing his duty beside Steve, well - that’s only to be expected, he thinks. At some point she will be relaxed enough around him that he can push her on why he’s here and what Pierce’s plans are for him.

It’s Wanda’s own unguarded reaction that cracks his resolve just slightly. He’s just told her about the veritable quest that Sam had gone on to tame his falcon Redwing, and her reaction to his description of the affection between falconer and falcon is a positively heartbreaking, “That sounds nice.” When he looks over at her the smile on her face is struggling and her eyes are shining, and Bucky can’t quite help himself.

“Why do you help Pierce, then?“

She shuts herself off immediately, so prickly that it reminds Bucky wildly of Steve. “That’s none of your business,” she snaps.

“I beg to differ,” Bucky snaps right back. “I’m the one he has you doing spells on. If anything I deserve to know why.”

Wanda bites her lip as she looks away from him. The silence between them stretches out for so long that for a moment Bucky’s sure that he’s messed everything up, that he’s not going to get any answers out of Wanda at all, but then: “My brother,” she says, almost inaudibly.

“Your...brother,” Bucky says, more than a little dumbfounded.

“Pierce has him. He’s my twin, and - and if I don’t do what he says -”

“Your twin dies,” Bucky says. Wanda makes a noise of protest, but she doesn’t deny it. When he turns to her she looks raw, broken open, and he doesn’t want to make himself press the advantage but he does. “And what does Pierce want you to do to me, in an ideal world?”

“In an ideal world - brainwash you,” Wanda chokes out. Her voice is very small between them. “Turn you into his servant. Then send you back to your position.”

“I see,” Bucky says. He can’t really help the coldness in his voice, but he does regret it when he sees it make Wanda flinch back. “So why hasn’t it been done?”

That has Wanda turning to look at him. “I can’t,” she says simply. “I’ve done magic on your mind already and you broke it. You have - you have immunity now. I can’t do the same thing for you, and Pierce wants the same thing.”

Bucky stares at her. “So what’s the plan now?”

Wanda only shrugs.

~*~

As though their conversation summoned him, it does not seem very long before Pierce comes down to their rooms. Wanda scrambles to her feet and waves her hands frantically at Bucky when she hears the telltale shutting of a door. She’s fast enough that Bucky’s a swan and in a cage before the second door opens, but she’s not fast enough to make it out of the room before Pierce gets to them.

He raises an eyebrow at Wanda, who is staring at her feet. “I was going to congratulate you on keeping to yourself so well, but I don’t know whether I should, now.” The expression on Wanda’s face is heartbreaking, a mixture of fear and furious anger that is evident even in profile. Pierce doesn’t seem the least bit fazed, only tilting his head. “Do I need to be concerned?”

“No, Lord Pierce,” Wanda murmurs, and to her credit she even sounds slightly sincere when she says his title.

“Good,” Pierce says, casting an indecipherable look at Bucky and beckoning Wanda out of the room. She goes, but at the last moment she looks back and leaves the door just slightly ajar.

“You said you can’t do anything more to him. Does that still stand today?” Pierce asks.

“Yes,” Wanda says, and her fear is clear, even through a door and without seeing her. “I can’t - I can’t re-cast spells on someone. I can’t even cast similar spells on them.”

Pierce swears. Through the crack of the door, Wanda’s tense back and clenched fists are visible, and not much else.

The conversation descends into Pierce suggesting various types of spell and Wanda insisting that she can’t do them. She even gives him various citations so he can look it up himself. She’s a dear to leave the door open so that Bucky can hear their conversation and at least try to pretend as though he’s an active participant in the situation, but the truth of the matter is that he’s not, and he’s not sure that any number of open doors will change that.

The way Pierce swears is quiet and fierce, and it’s scarier for that because of the control he keeps throughout. “Alright,” he says finally. “I’ll get a man on the job.” He finally leaves, and when Wanda comes back into the room her hands are shaking almost too badly to turn Bucky back into a human. She looks like she’s aged decades in the span of minutes.

“I wish he would go away,” she says desolately. “I wish someone would see what he’s doing.” When Bucky opens his mouth she turns and glares at him. “Well, if you can come up with a way to - to go to Pierce’s castle, get the most heavily guarded person in there out before he realises where we’re going and has us all killed, and then find him a safe place to stay, then I - I’m all ears, I’ll be the one who shows everyone what he’s doing,” she says. “And no,” she adds when she turns around and finds Bucky staring speculatively at her, pointedly turning away from him, “I can’t teleport. Or at least I don’t know how. But given that I’ve been studying it for years I think it’s safe to say I just can’t do it.”

~*~

“You really think you can help?” Wanda asks, arching her eyebrows and folding her arms as Bucky nods up at her. He doesn’t really blame her for being unimpressed; he does, after all, have motivation to lie about thinking he could help.

“I said so, didn’t I?” Bucky asks. “I don’t say things I don’t mean.

“Sure,” Wanda says slowly.

“It’s probably not a very _good_ plan,” Bucky prevaricates. “But Sorcerer Strange came to the castle a few times, and I know he can create portals. Wanda’s face twists/

“You think I haven’t _thought_ of that?” she snaps. “You don’t - you don’t _understand_ , I can’t even go that far. I can barely leave the castle before someone spots me and reports it to him, I can barely leave this _room_. And he can order his staff at the castle to kill Pietro in a _moment_. Just like that.” She snaps her fingers and there’s an illustrative flash of red - there and gone. Just like that.

“How does Pierce get word back to his lands?” Bucky asks. “You’re telling me there’s no time between getting out and - and this Pietro -”

“No,” Wanda snaps. Her arms are folded so tight across her chest that Bucky wonders for a moment if they’re going to break. “He has a book. He writes in it, and his - his staff, his chief of staff, whoever has the other book, they see it. It’s so _easy_ , but - but -”

“You know where he keeps the book?” Bucky asks brusquely, pretending not to see the way she ducks her head to wipe her eyes on her shoulders because he knows it’d only humiliate her to have it pointed out.

“No,” Wanda says, and then amends it to, “Not on him.”

“Oh,” Bucky says.

Wanda sighs and slides down the door, arms still wrapped around herself. “He has amulets,” she says. “So my magic won’t work on him, most other kinds of magic won’t work on him. And he has my brother, and he has my magic, and he has so many spies -”

Bucky walks over slowly to sit down next to her. She sniffs and doesn’t quite shuffle closer. With her so close it is easy to see the dark, haggard circles under her eyes, the thinness in her fingers and unhealthy sharpness in her cheekbones. He wants to start know everything she knows: anything, everything she knows about Pierce and his habits and methods and intentions.

“Just one more question,” he says finally. “For now,” he admits when she raises an eyebrow at him. “Why doesn’t he just kill me, instead of...all this?” He gestures around.

Wand a shrugs. “He hopes you can be of use to him,” she says. “Besides, Sorcerer Strange has wards on the castle that means the council all know if someone been killed on castle grounds, no? So he’d have to take the extra step of taking you somewhere else, and - too much. But mostly he wants to control you.”

“And through me, Steve,” Bucky murmurs, because he’s been thinking about it and that seems like the only thing that makes sense. It’s a horrible plan; it’s a genius plan.

Wanda’s still watching him when he finally inhales again. There’s wariness in her eyes, as though she’s expecting him to push further, to ask her more questions. And for a moment, he’s tempted to. The sooner he knows everything she knows, the sooner he’ll be able to come with a plan to get them out of this situation. But her last answer had been enough to prove that both her information and he would still be there in a few days.

“You should sleep,” he tells her. Her eyes widen a little at the words, and to be frank he’s a little surprised at himself for them, but he’s always taken care of people - of Steve, of Sam and Nat and Clint, of the guards underneath him - and he’s not about to take back the statement when it’s so clearly true. “Turn me back into a swan if it makes you more comfortable. In case someone stops by.”

“I - right,” Wanda says. “Okay. I can...do that.”

Once he’s been boxed neatly back up into the shape of a swan, he stays sitting where he is, expecting cage bars to materialise around him, but to his surprise those that do are utterly different to the ones before; where he’d only just had the space to stretch his wings before, now the cage takes up most of the room, stopping only a little short of the door. It is wide enough for him to pace.

He looks up at her, a sort of coo building in his throat, but she is already curled up in a magically summoned pile of blankets.

~*~

Of course, Pierce promptly has to ruin it all by showing up on very short notice very soon after his first visit. Bucky is in human form when the door to the other room clicks in that deliberate way he has, and there’s genuine, desperate fear in Wanda’s eyes as she waves her hands and turns Bucky back into a swan just before the second door opens. Pierce doesn’t seem to think that anything’s wrong, but he is exactly the sort of predator who would let their prey thing nothing was wrong, letting them twist themselves around in their own anxiety. Even as he leaves complaining about upcoming feast preparations, he seems utterly in control.

Wanda avoids him for days after that incident. For the first time since she had first taken up residence in the same room as Bucky, she leaves, sleeps in the room outside instead of risking a conversation with him.She even goes so far as to widen the bars of his cage just slightly and place his food outside so she doesn’t have to risk touching him. That, at least, doesn’t work; Bucky honks every time a hand appears at first, and then starts nipping irritably, ignoring her muffled curses.

Finally, she gets rid of the cage around Bucky, lets him have the room to himself even if she doesn’t turn him back into a human. “Stop biting me,” she says irritably, and slams the door shut again. It’s not quite the progress that Bucky was hoping for, to say the least, but he continues undeterred as she starts coming in again.

“Don’t look at me like that,” she says flatly, the next time she comes in with a handful of greens and red magic twining around her hands. Bucky makes another hopeful noise, and Wanda throws the food at him. “I said don’t, James,” she snaps, but she wedges her back against the door and turns him into a human. “Happy? We might get caught at any time, Pierce could - he might see you and - he might -”

“Don’t think about it like that,” Bucky tries.

“How _else_ am I supposed to think about it?” Wanda almost yells.

“Think of it as something you can clearly keep under control,” Bucky tells her. She takes a shaky breath and her fists unclench slightly at her sides, but she’s still tense and trembling against the door. “You can switch me between forms in a second,” Bucky tells her. “Frankly, it’s kind of annoying, but it works in your favour in this case.”

That makes Wanda crack a smile. “Is it really that annoying?” she asks.

“Sometimes I feel like flapping my arms and running to take off into the air,” Bucky says dryly. “Sometimes i’m convinced that I should be swinging my wings by my sides. It’s kind of annoying, yes.” It is _very_ annoying, but he shoots a smile at Wanda to take the sting out of the sentiment, and she smiles back.

“No, but,” he says, “I’ve been meaning to ask you - did you catch what Pierce said on his way out, that second visit?”

Wanda gives him an uncertain look but obliges. “Something about a feast,” she says. “Three days away. Something about the preparations for it?”

For the first time in a very long while, Bucky feels his lips stretch in a smile. “ _Good_ ,” he says emphatically, mind racing. “I’m going to need to ask you some more questions, but -” he rubs his hands together. “But I think I have a plan.”


	6. Chapter 6

Steve is going out of his mind.

He doesn’t understand it, doesn’t understand how this could have happened. It’s been nearly a week since Bucky had disappeared yet again from the lake, and there hasn’t been the slightest sign of him. Steve had sat for ages on the side of the lake, Nat standing behind him, and Bucky hadn’t come. He hadn’t been there. He’s still alive, if their bond is anything to go by, and for all that it might not be Steve clutches to the promise of it with both hands, but Bucky seems to have just - disappeared.

Or so it seems, as Sam and Nat are so fond of reminding him. Things don’t just disappear: they go somewhere, or they’re taken. With Bucky - well, Steve doubts it’s the first, but he can’t quite bear the thought of the second.

He starts flinching every time preparations for the feast are brought up, because possibly the most reasonable explanation that he can think of - and possibly the worst one, as well - is that someone from the kitchens had seen a swan in the castle and taken the opportunity to provide the feast with a memorable centrepiece. It’s not out of the realm of possibility that the kitchen staff would be keeping it as a surprise, which would otherwise be rather nice of them, but in this particular situation -

Sam had very kindly gone down to the kitchen to do some snooping, and insisted that none of them had so much as touched a swan for the past few months. Steve can even bring himself to believe that, sometimes.

It wasn’t entirely surprising that Sorcerer Strange couldn’t do anything with Steve’s new information. All he could say was, “If he was on castle grounds it explains why I wouldn’t have been able to scry for him.” And all Steve can do is breathe in and out and try not to show how frustrated he is.

“I suppose it’s good to know that those wards work,” Strange continues, utterly unruffled.

“I suppose it is,” Steve murmurs, feeling very uncharitable towards those wards. “And you can’t scry for him now?”

“I can, but if he’s still on castle grounds I won’t find anything,” Strange warned. And, sure enough, he’d spent minutes upon minutes on the floor with nothing to show for it, Steve’s hope rapidly diminishing with every motionless second that ticks by.

“Thank you for trying, in any case,” Steve says, when Strange unfolds himself from the floor.

“I’ll go back and find a list of all the properties I’ve cast the same or similar protection spells on,” he says as he shakes Steve’s hand. “They may be trying to take advantage of this.”

Steve had expected a short list, but what he’d been sent is an absurdly long list, easily the length of his arm, with far too many names on it. Strange may have kept himself and his school determinedly quiet, but he’s been active enough. It’s legal, but it’s distinctly unwelcome all the same.

“Hey,” Nat says quietly, placing one hand on his shoulder as letters swirl in his vision. He’s seen that hand take people twice her size down without even the help of her other hand, but it’s so gentle against Steve now. “It’ll be fine. We’ll find him.”

Steve shoves the list away, rubs his eyes vigorously so that the only thing dancing in his vision are white spots. “Sure,” he says, once he’s withdrawn himself from his hands. “Yeah. I know.”

Natasha doesn’t call him out on the lie, but they’re both so acutely aware of it that she doesn’t need to.

The thing is - the thing is, when Bucky had disappeared before it was mostly thanks to Bucky that he’d escaped, and at least half of Steve’s eventual realisation was sheer dumb luck and Bucky taking advantage of him in his pliable sleepy state. Currently, he’s zero for two on the finding Bucky cound, and the fact that he’s even _let_ it happen again -

“We’ll find him,” Sam insists from where he’s leaning against the wall. “Don’t get that tragic look on your face. We know what we’re looking for and a little more about what we’re dealing with. And then he can go back to being an asshole as a human.” A wave of gratitude and guilt rises up in Steve, tangling and complicated. He’s asking them to believe the unbelievable based on nothing more than his word, and they are all accepting it or putting an extraordinary effort into pretending to accept it. He doesn’t know what he’d do if he didn’t have them behind him. He is so very glad that he made friends of his knights.

“We’ll start looking,” Sam says, ever-practical. “There’s three of us, and only so much castle.”

“And people are busy with preparations for the feast,” Natasha adds. “As long as we’re unobtrusive, I don’t see why we’d raise suspicion. Bucky picked a good time to disappear.” Steve tries to glare at her, and she ignores it as she always does. “Between the three of us, we can probably go through most of the place before too long.”

“Will it even help?” Steve asks dubiously. “I doubt that the people behind this could be found just by looking through the castle.”

“No?” Natasha asks, arching an eyebrow. Steve shrugs.

“It seems too easy,” he admits.

“It’s worth trying,” Sam says, and Steve can’t deny it.

“Thank you,” he says. There’s no way he can express the gratitude churning through his heart, but from the way Sam and Nat smile at him he thinks he manages a little of it.

~*~

Of course, things can’t stay that simple. It’s at the tail end of one of the small council meetings that Pierce ambushes him. It’s his favourite time to do such things, because there is ultimately no real defence against the tiredness that comes with several hours of arguing and taxes.

“Oh, Steve, I nearly forgot,” he says innocently, which is never a good starting sentence, “Regarding the matter of your guard…”

He trails off expectantly, and Steve stares blankly at him. “Yes?” he has to prompt, after several seconds of uncomfortable silence.

“It’s come to my attention that you’re still - well, one man short, as it were,” Pierce says, to a round of nods.

“Indeed,” Steve says, and he can feel himself going from slightly slumped to holding himself tight, waiting for a point to be made.

“I understand that what’s holding you back from a temporary hire is its, ah, temporary nature?” Pierce asks.

“Yes,” Steve says. He feels more and more like Pierce is casting a net and he is being manipulated into it, and Pierce’s next words only confirm the hunch.

“In that case, it would be a privilege if I could offer you someone from my own guard,” he says. “Brock - that is, Sir Brock Rumlow. He’s my best man, easily.”

“Oh, surely -” Steve starts to protest, but Pierce raises a hand, slashes it downwards.

“I won’t accept no for an answer, Steven,” he says seriously. “Your safety is of the utmost importance. And,” he adds, voice raising as he no doubt sees the arguments that are bubbling up Steve’s throat, “he would understand his position perfectly. If or when you return to the regular number of four personal guards, Brock will simply be reabsorbed into my own guard with no issue.”

“It’s a good idea, Steven,” Fury says, gravelly. “We always need your personal guard to be at full strength.”

“Surely your own guard shouldn’t be a man short on my account,” Steve tries in what feels like one last desperate parry.

“Unlike you, Steven, I have no compunctions about temporary hires,” Pierce says.

There’s not much Steve can do, with all four of them staring at him. Pierce lays what is probably meant to be a fatherly hand over his arm.

“I’d be honoured to accept your offer, Lord Pierce,” Steve finally says. Pierce bows his head in acknowledgement and pats at Steve’s forearm, a brief pleased gesture.

“I’ll send him to meet with your other guards in the morning,” he says. “And, if you don’t mind my saying so, you’d best get to bed. You look dead on your feet.”

“If nobody else has anything to bring up?” Steve asks. When nobody does he lets himself respond. “I’ve no doubt you’re right, Lord Pierce,” he says to Pierce as he rises. “I look forward to meeting your Sir Rumlow.”

Pierce nods, self-satisfied as always.

~*~

“Rumlow?” Sam is the one to ask, when Steve tells his guards of this new development. Steve hums unhappily.

“You know him?” he asks.

“He’s Pierce’s first knight,” Clint offers, and Sam nods in agreement.

“A good fighter,” Nat offers. From her, that is high praise. “And having him around will give us -” she gestures at Sam and Clint, and then herself, “- more time to search the castle.”

“True,” Steve says on a sigh, rubbing his face. “That’s true.”

When Rumlow comes up he introduces himself with a nod and a mumble, and looks obligingly to Sam for direction. For all that Steve doesn’t exactly want someone new around, Rumlow is aggressively neutral enough to put most of Steve’s apprehensions to rest. He’s Pierce’s best for a reason - he’s silent and fairly unobtrusive and obviously capable of combat should the need arise. Despite the way the two of them have essentially been shoved together, Steve can’t complain about him.

What he can - and does - complain about is the feast, which is drawing inexorably closer. Everyone in the castle seems to have been sent to a new level of panic as they work to make sure that the even will be perfect, from food to decorations to guards. Steve’s desk overflows with letters every morning that threaten to overrun the entire room if they are not given their due attention, and in the chaos Pierce and Fury try to whisk an act past him that will stop him from continuing to try and diversify the council. In response he calls the next council meeting “feast preparations” and brings in representatives from various guilds to ask their opinions. They’d run amok, particularly the head of the Inventor’s Guild whom Coulson now swore was not allowed anywhere near the castle, but Steve maintains that it was worth it.

Natasha had been right in saying that the feast would keep people busy, but what she hadn’t counted on was the solidarity between castle workers as their lives collectively grew busier. Usually Steve would be pleased at the camaraderie between everyone, at the way they were all comfortably ready to coerce anyone in the back corridors who looked vaguely idle into service, but as it is - he wants to tear his hair out, a little, slightly. It loses them valuable time, keeps their search through the castle unbearably slow.

At the end of the day the three of them will invariably return to his rooms with empty hands and remorseful expressions, and Steve’s not sure he can stand it much longer, both the fact that they haven’t found anything and the way they’re so sorry about it.

The one good thing about this feast is that it’s a simple enough affair, and it takes place over one night only: unlike the coronation, nobody will be staying in the castle in order to attend. They write him letters ceaselessly and they will come on the night but that is the end of it.

The days tick by increasingly quickly, and the pace of the castle is pushed into trying to match it. Everywhere Steve goes, it seems as though there are people running, people with hands flying on their work, people bickering about what to do and how to do it and where would be best. Even his advisors are not immune to the heightened frantic pace of life, snapping and sniping at one another in their meetings. Pierce and Fury get into a rousing argument about what constitutes sufficient levels of grain storage, the imminent harvesting of winter wheat, the condition of the country’s roads, and just as everyone has given up on them and started to clear the room, they go from arguing to talking with no hard feelings left behind, as always seems to happen with the two of them. It wouldn’t have been particularly relevant or even noteworthy except for the way that Coulson manages to use it to inquire about the stocks of meat they have preserved, and Steve’s heart thumps painfully in his chest at the thought of anyone going out into the forest for quarry.

“Meat is one of the easiest things to go without and hardest to get,” Steve says. He’s not wrong, but from the way his heart thumps in his chest nobody could tell.

His advisors murmur in agreement; Pierce and Coulson both shoot him sideways looks they think are subtle that have Steve wanting to crawl out of his own skin.

~*~

The days pass in such a blur that Steve could swear all he does is blink and the preparations have sailed by, the castle having collectively managed to cobble something respectable together out of the mess of the past week: the hall is ready, the music is starting, and his council are shoving him onto the dais constructed beside the main staircase. Steve holds himself almost as stiffly as his clothes, shaking hands and exchanging vague pleasantries with each and every visitor who filters into the fall. Those interactions can be divided into three categories: the too-firm attempt at coming off as respectably assertive, the openmouthed limp handshakes, and the coy giggling.

The place is bustling with people, visitors of all sorts, and the atmosphere of the room is lively, convivial. And yet all Steve can think of is that none of them are Bucky, whom he would know at a glance even if he hadn’t had to greet everyone who’d come in.

“You all right?” Sam asks from behind him, gentle as always and barely audible over the noise of the crowd. Steve gives himself a little shake, tries to reorient himself.

“Yeah,” he says. “Don’t worry about me. I’m fine.” From the periphery of the room, Nat nods at them, and when Steve looks upwards he can see Clint in the rafters.

“Hard not to,” Sam rebukes, but he stays gentle about it, and the next time there’s a break in guests he takes the opportunity to step closer to Steve and slip some food into his hands.

“Thanks,” Steve mutters back. There’s no way to be subtle about eating when he’s so prominently placed at the entrance of the room and so close to the head of the table which has been descended upon by guests, but he still tries to put in a token effort. Unfortunately for him, masking the motion of his hand as a yawn is the only plausible way to get his hand up near his mouth at all, and a yawn earns him the same reproving frowns as outright eating would from his advisors and some of the bolder nobility, all of whom can comfortably reach for the table at any time. It’s the citizens of the city who wink at him good-naturedly.

“Bad luck,” Sam says sympathetically, obviously catching some of the reproachful glares being levelled at him.

“Thanks,” Steve mutters, only slightly sarcastic. He gives up on the pretence of yawning and bites at the warm pastry in his hands.

Coulson makes his way over and brushes imaginary crumbs off Steve’s shirt. “We’re closing the doors in ten minutes,” he says, and for all that there’s a reproach hidden in the words as well Steve can feel himself straighten at the promise of only having to stay here for ten more minutes to shake hands like a wind-up doll.

“Understood,” he says with a nod, and acquiesces to Coulson’s sense of propriety by giving him the half-eaten pastry.

“Thank you,” Coulson says, and whisks it away mercilessly.

Steve wouldn’t exactly put it past his council to stretch out that ten minutes, but eventually the doors close and Steve can come off the dais to eat and mingle.

“D’you see him?” he asks Sam as they make their way through the crowd towards the food, even though he knows - he _knows_ \- that if Bucky was here Steve would have spotted him.

“No,” Sam says quietly. 

~*~

Steve tries not to hinge all his hopes on Bucky somehow turning up to the ball, but even so he can feel his hope dwindling as the night wears on. It gets so that all he has to do is look at one of his guards and they know the questions in his mind and inevitably shake their heads subtly at him.

The tables have been cleared away and dancing has begun in earnest when the night takes a decidedly strange turn. Steve going through the motions of his second set when he hears an insistent, arrhythmic tapping underneath the waltz that the musicians are currently playing. He swings his partner around so that he can stare at them, but even as he does that he knows that they’ve been practicing for too long to make that kind of error repeatedly, and he doubts that any of their instruments is capable of the annoying tapping. Sure enough, some of them are looking around irritably for the source of the noise when he turns to see them.

He bows to his partner when the waltz ends and promptly whisks Nat up in a dance before anyone else can approach him, much less ask. “Sorry to grab you like that,” he says lowly as they begin their turn around the floor. This kind of interaction between them is noticeable enough that he knows she’s not quite happy with it; Natasha likes to protect him from the shadows, but he has to ask: “Do you hear that?”

“The tapping?” she asks, eyes sharp as they meet his for what is, he realises briefly, the first time since they have started dancing. It is an instant, and then she goes back to surveying the room, flitting around, assessing. “It’s coming from the windows. They’re strong, but I’m not sure the ones near the top are as well fortified as they can be.”

This time she’s the one to manoeuvre him so that he can look at the windows she’s referring to, at the top of the room near the ceiling, placed so as to better allow sunshine and moonlight to stream inside. They’re sturdy, he knows, but not as much as they could be, for the simple reason that it was nearly impossible to climb to those highest windows, and a fall from that height was incapacitating.

“I’m not sure I like it,” Steve says, as another tap comes from behind him, sends unease crawling down his spine. Nat smiles at him thinly.

“None of us do, I don’t think. Clint’s checking it out. Your guards are in and out of the room. We’ve got a handle on this,” Natasha says. “And Sam’s got a cone to shout into.”

“A - oh,” Steve says. Natasha, knowing full well that particular plan is not among Steve’s favourites, shoots him a coolly amused look.

“Don’t worry,” she says. “No starting panicky riots unless we _really_ need the distraction. I remember.”

“You remember, but that doesn’t mean you’ll oblige me,” Steve grumbles. Natasha drops her jaw and puts a shocked hand on her chest, elongating the movement by spinning out underneath Steve’s arm. Somehow, she manages to make it all look like an elaborate step to the dance.

“You wound -” she starts, and promptly cuts herself off when a new round of noises occur. Objectively the noises are very quiet, Steve knows, and hidden beneath the chattering in the room, but to his uneasy mind they sound more like bangs than taps; even if most people haven’t noticed it, he can see it putting Nat on edge, and that more than anything makes Steve anxious.

The banging stops for about half a song, and then restarts. Sam gestures for the musicians to play louder, but some people are noticing - they look around themselves and each other and, crucially, at Steve, who puts an even more pointedly calm smile on his face than normal. The song comes to an end, and his partner curtsies low.

The banging softens into little thuds, and as he spins Steve sees Clint stride into the room, sees Natasha sidle up to him, both of them doing an extraordinarily good job at looking relaxed even if Steve knows them well enough to see the tension humming through Nat’s frame.

He loses sight of the two of them for a second as he continues to dance, and when he turns again only Clint is there, leaning relaxed against the wall. He doesn’t have to wonder where Natasha has gotten to before she appears in front of him, intercepting his dance so smoothly that the lady who’s been cut out only stands for several seconds, blinking at the suddenly empty air in front of her.

“That wasn’t very nice,” Steve says, not bothering to pretend to chide her. Natasha doesn’t respond, only spins them more forcefully until he has reached one of the small unobtrusive doors that lead to the kitchens. “What are you up to?”

“You’re going to want to see this,” she promises him, enigmatic as always, and he barely has time to roll his eyes at her before she spins him right into the door. As with most of the service doors in the castle, it swings both ways for easier pushing when hands happen to be full, so he trips through with very little resistance; with a stumble and a bitten-off curse he’s in the small connecting corridor between the hall and the kitchens.

“Nat, wh -” he starts, and then he sees the man in front of him and only gapes.

“It’s Pierce,” Bucky blurts out without so much as a greeting, all urgency, stepping closer. “I need you to know, just in case -”

“Bucky -” Steve almost doesn’t care that Bucky is naming one of the oldest, closest advisors in court. Bucky’s - he’s _safe_ and he’s _here_ again, and Steve flings his arms around Bucky’s neck so fast that he only narrowly misses slapping him in the eye. His chest swells fiercely at having him near again.

“Didn’t you hear me?” Bucky asks. “It’s _Pierce_.” His voice is urgent and his body is tense against Steve’s, but his hands have found their place on Steve’s waist.

“Pierce,” Steve repeats. “I - can you - how? Why?”

“He wants to destablise you,” Bucky says. “You’re coming into power, and soon. The more distraught you are, the more you will listen to him, to your advisors. You’ve been doing it ever since I disappeared. Am I wrong?”

Is he? “I - I don’t know,” Steve says helplessly. He’s thinks he’s always listened to his advisors, or tried to.

“He’s at the feast, though,” Bucky says, his tone asking for confirmation, and Steve nods. Bucky’s grip tightens, convulsive, and then releases. “Listen. The witch who did this to me - she did it for Pierce because her brother is threatened. Keep Pierce in the room long enough for her to get to the city and back.”

“What’s she going to do?” Steve asks. His voice has dropped to a whisper, unbidden, and his thoughts are starting to race, his skin crawling as though there are ants under him. “How long do we need to keep him?”

“She’ll ask Sorcerer Strange for his help, if he will offer it,” Bucky says. “She’ll be most of the way there by now - the talking and the journey back should not take more than another hour and a half. An hour if she runs.” He smiles at Steve gently. “And I think she will run.”

“All right. Two hours, then. To be safe.” The feast has already finished, but the dancing has no set times. Resolve courses through Steve, along with a desperate sort of anger that he tamps down on carefully. “We can keep the dancing going for that long.” He disengages himself from Bucky reluctantly to turn back to the ballroom, only to find himself waylaid.

“Be careful,” Bucky tells him, low, looming over him in that protective way he does so well. “Don’t do anything you wouldn’t have done before. Don’t even look at him too strangely -”

“You worry too much,” Steve tells him. It’s true, but it’s also categorically not appreciated if the scowl on Bucky’s face is anything to go by.

“You don’t worry enough,” he says. “Stay _safe_ , all right? We’re so close to getting out of this thing.”

“You too,” Steve whispers, putting one hand on Bucky’s arm. “You too, alright? Please. I can’t - I don’t want -” he chokes himself to a stop, not entirely sure what to say, how to say it.

Bucky shifts his arms so that he can hold Steve’s yearning hands in his own. “You won’t lose me, Rogers,” he says. “Not if this works, not ever. I’ll find a way to come back to you,” he says, and Steve can hear the oath in his voice.

“You’d better,” Steve says weakly.

Bucky swoops forward and kisses Steve then, a brief, hard press of lips that resembles a punch almost more than it does a kiss, and pushes Steve out the door again before he can try to react.

Natasha, ever-reliable, is waiting for him, and swoops in to start quickstepping with him before his awkward re-entry can be noticed by anyway. “I don’t think anyone noticed you were gone,” she reports, “and there’s nothing wrong with needing some air.”

“Thanks for thinking so,” Steve says dryly, and gets a pinch on the arm for his efforts.

The trumpets take it upon themselves to improvise a particularly loud solo, and Natasha seizes the opportunity to sweep Steve near them and ask, “How is he?”

“Fine, for now,” Steve replies lowly, and waits for another crescendo in the music before speaking again. “He says we have to keep Pierce in the room another two hours. Can we do that?”

Natasha’s jaw juts out a little. “We can and we will,” she says coolly, and practically throws Steve between another pair in her haste to start managing it.

“Dreadfully sorry,” he says with his best charming smile, and ducks out from between them to make his way over to Sam, who is lounging against the wall watching everything with sharp eyes.

“Well?” he asks as Steve extricates himself from the crowd. “Everything alright?”

“Fine,” Steve says tersely, intensely aware of all the people around them. “The dancing will be going on a little longer than usual, maybe.”

“Okay,” Sam says agreeably. “I assume that’s what has Nat storming off like a productive hurricane?”

“That’d be right,” Steve agrees.

“Well, then it’s all settled,” Sam says, and Steve grins. If there’s anything he knows he can trust in, it’s that Nat will achieve whatever she sets her mind to.

“Let’s hope,” Steve says, watching Nat talk to the musicians. Half of them look wildly excited at what Nat’s saying to them, and the other half just nod along tiredly.

The next break in the music brings a gentle, surreptitious flock of people towards Steve, all of them eyeing him to see whether he’ll talk to them.

“Let me know when Pierce looks like he’s going to leave,” Steve says lowly as he moves politely towards them. “Can you -?”

“Of course I can,” Sam scoffs. “Check in with me. I’ll have my hand on my hip.”

“Thank you,” Steve murmurs, and accepts the next offer to dance, swirling away into the crowd and trying not to envy the way Sam can simply stand where he is, arms folded and shoulders against the wall, without being bothered.

~*~

It’s probably only to be expected that Steve twists his head to glance over at Sam so often over the next sets that his neck begins to grow sore. Sam takes it in his stride, keeping his arms both pointedly straight by his sides, occasionally catching Steve’s eyes and giving him a headshake or fond eye roll. Steve lets himself be swept across the dance floor, makes idle small talk on the edge of the room, but he’s not sure that anything can unknot the anxiety in his stomach. If he’d just had more time to think, more time with Bucky - there’s so much he could have asked, so much he could have said. Bucky had looked fine, and he’d passed on the information he’d needed to, but Steve still doesn’t know the first thing about where Bucky’s been, how he’s been, what’s been done to him.

He’d looked fine. Steve clings to that, and to this current task. The next time he looks at Steve his heart jumps painfully in his chest because Sam’s arms aren’t stiffly beside him anymore; he forces himself to relax again once he sees they’re folded across his chest.

“Sam says you need to stop going out of your mind,” Nat says under her breath as she sneaks through the crowd to snatch Steve up between sets again.

“How can I,” Steve mutters, glancing once again, helplessly, at Sam leaning against the wall.

Nat pats his arm in a movement that is definitely not in the dance. “We have an advantage,” she says simply. “We have a plan, and we’re going to carry it out.” And at that she twirls away as she so likes to do, leaving Steve alone in the middle of the room.

He sighs and drops his arms. When he looks over at Sam once again, though, that sigh tries to turn into a gasp and nearly chokes him along the way, because Sam has his hands down by his sides.

It can’t have been a minute since Steve last looked over, but his heart still goes into overdrive, panicking at the thought of having not been told for even a few brief seconds.

Sam tilts his head meaningfully towards Pierce, who is rather obviously canvassing the exits past the swirling crowd. He doesn’t look best pleased when Steve makes his way over, and that expression only falls deeper into unhappiness before he irons it out when Steve greets him and starts to speak.

If anyone asked him later, Steve couldn’t say what he’d spoken of to Pierce, his mind was that blank with panic; all he knew was that he managed to draw both Fury and Coulson into the conversation and turn it into an argument he steadfastly stayed out of.

“Don’t look at me,” he says more than once, when looked to for an opinion. “You know I don’t get between you when you argue morality.”

“A wise man,” Fury says soberly. For a moment there is a brief sort of hope as they all look at each other and the possibility of the argument ending raises its head tentatively. Then Coulson takes a breath and goes back to arguing the disadvantages of an organised shadow military, and Steve breathes a sigh of relief.

“Steven, oughtn’t you take a turn around the room?” Pierce asks him during a lull in the argument.

“Only if you do,” Steve says at once, smiling widely enough that his cheeks protest as he tries to give off the most unsuspecting, amiable impression he can. “Don’t think I haven’t noticed how you’ve stayed in this corner all evening,” he says earnestly. “You should dance as well.”

“Well, now,” Pierce tries to prevaricate, but it is too late; Natasha has stepped forward to back Steve up, offering her hand as Steve assures Pierce that Natasha was a simply wonderful dancer. Under that pressure, Coulson’s encouragement, and Fury’s good-natured heckling, Pierce relents to one turn. There’s a certain fierceness to Natasha’s posture as she leaves with him; Steve doesn’t have to look further to know that she will find a way to stretch one turn into several.

His next partners blur together into an indistinguishable mass as he focuses wholly on trying to keep his gaze on Natasha and Pierce moving around the room even as he himself moves around the move. The crowd has begun to thin out as people retire, enough that he can spot them from across the room even if it does take a few moments of panicked scanning.

The room only grows emptier as time crawls onwards, horribly slow. Soon enough it is only those who reside in the castle that remain, and Steve feels as taut as a bowstring. Natasha has drawn Pierce into an entertaining discussion if his face is anything to go by, both of them standing at the side of the room making expansive gestures at each other.

When there’s a lull in the music long enough to be noticeable, Steve looks to the musicians and finds them packing away their instruments. Pierce is heading towards the door, and Steve’s heart leaps to his throat.

“Tell me it’s been two hours,” he says, returning to Sam’s side at a stride that is too fast to pass off as casual.

“One hour and fifty minutes,” he says, and places a hand on Steve’s clenched fist. “It’s okay. It’s close.”

“It’s enough,” Steve says, and hopes desperately that it’s true.


	7. Chapter 7

The food has been served, the plates washed, and there is dancing to be done - there are not many places safer than a corridor to the kitchens, right now. Even so, the door into this particular corridor is built without handles, the better to push them open when one’s arms are full of food - it makes the place a precarious hiding place, perilously easy to discover, and one that Bucky definitely should not be standing around in. His work is done, his part of their plan complete; now all he has to do is make it safely back to the basement.

And yet here he is, peering through the crack between door and wall and hoping for another glimpse of Steve. He tenses every time there is a noise against the door, or it sways on its hinges, but his mouth still burns with that unwise, impulsive kiss, and he can’t bring his feet to move.

It takes two particularly terrible dancing nearly bumping the door open for him to dart away, instead of any particular willpower of his own. He can’t say that he’s ever had much of that, when it came to Steve.

He darts through the kitchens and ducks through empty back passages, running his hands carefully along the wall until one dips, slipping past the appearance of solid stone to reach into Wanda’s carefully created tunnel. It’s cold and dark and vaguely damp, but he shoves himself forwards anyway with his head down and hands and knees slipping on the stone, crawls endlessly through pitch blackness with his teeth gritted and his knees protesting and gravel scraping into his palms.

Bucky knew every inch of this castle backwards, after a childhood of running wild in the back passages and an adulthood accompanying Steve through the front ones; it was his knowledge that had mapped out the path that this tunnel took, and for all that he knew they had to keep any possibility of Pierce seeing through the illusion to a minimum, for all that he knows that this is the safest path, he curses himself for the absurd length of the tunnel, its numerous twists and turns.

Their plan is a good one. Wanda is putting a staggering amount of trust in Bucky by even considering it, let alone going along with it, but those thoughts are cold comfort as Bucky slips again on the stone and cracks his elbow against something sharp and uncomfortable.

It’s almost a surprise when he tumbles around a corner and finds himself on the ground where he’d started, as though his mind was prepared to remain crawling through dark rock forever. He picks himself up and rushes to the door, slumps in relief when he sees that the hair he’d wrapped around the handle is still unbroken. He untangles it gently and pockets it, because somehow it feels like a great shame to break the strand now.

~*~

Wanda had left a charm for him on the ground; a small scrap of cloth, glowing faintly red. If he touches it, he’ll turn into a swan again. He’s sat next to and staring at it, waiting on tenterhooks for some kind of noise, when the very air in front of him sparks fitfully and yanks itself open into a circle. Bucky pushes himself backwards, his fingers a moment away from that small cloth charm, and then Wanda falls through the opening in the air with a yelp and messy hair and a smile splitting her face.

Bucky is stumbling to his feet before he realises what he’s doing, lunging forward to grab Wanda’s arms. “Tell me,” he says, desperate and hopeful and so impatient he feels like he’s choking on it. “Wanda, c’mon, what -”

“Get _away_ -!” another voice shouts, and then a weight crashes into Bucky as Wanda shrieks something incomprehensible. He’s better trained than this, he swears he is, but he’s not expecting it and he’s been a swan for the past several months, which is definitely the excuse he’s going to use if anyone ever finds out he’s been tackled to the floor by a skinny bean sprout of a boy.

“Pietro, stop it, that’s not - Bucky, I’m sorry, I didn’t have time to tell him anything,” Wanda says apologetically, peeling Bucky’s attacker away. The name sends relief coursing through Bucky, has him slumping on the floor and closing his eyes as Wanda switches to her native tongue to, presumably, educate her brother.

“You did it,” he says when she finishes. He is flat on his back and has he biggest, dopiest smile on his face. The cold ground doesn’t matter, the vague ache in his hands and knees don’t matter. There’s an end to this, and he can see it.

“Sorcerer Strange did it,” Wanda says.

“Glad to,” a deep voice says, and that has Bucky ramrod straight in an instant, because he hadn’t heard anyone come in. When he looks, though, the reason is obvious: Sorcerer Strange’s chosen method of transport is evidently floating in midair, his cloak billowing soundlessly and dramatically around him.

“I’m very glad to see you,” Bucky says, holding out a hand. Strange’s mouth ticks up at one side as he takes it.

“I imagine so,” he says. “Next time you ought to come to me first.”

“I’ll do that,” Bucky says dryly, thinking about the closed-off building, the speculative looks from the people in the city when they saw him. Strange just nods at him.

“Here,” Pietro says suddenly. He sticks out one thin hand and his chin in a forceful peace offering, the expression vaguely reminiscent of Steve. The thought of Steve is enough to have energy surging through Bucky as he takes Pietro’s hand and stumbles to his feet. He’s going to see Steve, and soon. He feels like a kettle with its lid on too tight, ready to burst with anticipation.

Wanda reaches for her brother, squeezing his arm between her hands and drinking in the sight of him as though she’s still not sure that he’s quite real. Once she’s reassured herself she takes a breath, squares her shoulders, and allows herself to simply hold her brother’s hand. She seems to grow with the motions, filling the space around and above her with new confidence. It looks good on her.

“Let’s go,” she says, chin raised high.

“You mean - you’re - what’re you doing?” Bucky asks, even as he follows her out of the room, taking the place he usually takes behind Steve - just behind her, slightly to the left. They hadn’t discussed what was going to happen after. Bucky had vaguely assumed that Wanda would take her brother and go back to Sokovia, or at least far away from the castle, and that Bucky would bluff it out with Pierce until things came to a head.

Wanda shoots him a scornful look. “You didn’t think I’d just leave,” she says, more of a statement than a question, and Bucky tilts his head and looks at her. With her brother by her side she’s no longer that scared girl who would barely make eye contact with him. She has her feet planted on the ground and her head held high and she wasn’t letting anything make her run.

Bucky smiles at her. “Not anymore I don’t,” he says, and she sniffs and twists to face forward just a little too slowly to hide the small smile that blooms on her face.

“Sorcerer Strange agreed to back us up,” she says. Strange nods agreeably when Bucky turns to look at him.

“Good plan,” Bucky says slowly.

Wanda ducks her head and Bucky would bet that she’s blushing, but she doesn’t say a word, just leads them through the corridors with practiced ease. She trails her fingers along the stone walls as she walks, out of habit or necessity Bucky doesn’t know.

Bucky thinks that perhaps it should be stranger, to be walking through the halls he hasn’t been in for so long, but all it feels like is coming home. His memory hasn’t failed him, and each little idiosyncrasy and flaw he remembers in the walls and floor and hangings only sends a new thrill through him, another tiny earth-shattering confirmation that’s he’s finally back where he belongs.

Once again, they don’t run into anyone, and Bucky can’t quite be sure whether it’s because the dancing is still going or because everyone has packed up and gone to bed. He’s so absorbed in rediscovering his surroundings that he nearly misses it when Wanda makes a sharp right turn onto the balconies.

“Wh - hey, hey, hey,” he says, reaching out to touch her wrist, and then to grasp it as she tries to shake him off and keep going. “Where d’you think you’re going?”

Wanda slants him a strange look over her shoulder, eyebrows knitted together. “The feast,” she says. “Where everyone will be.”

“That’s not a good idea,” Bucky says. He’s too much like Natasha in that way; he prefers the shadows. The last thing he wants is for a spectacle to be made out of his return. It’s probably going to happen regardless of whether and where the truth comes out, but there are still preventative measures he can take, like not bursting into the middle of a feast with a witch and a sorcerer by his side. “It’s too public.”

Wanda tilts her head to one side, the movement quick and bird-like. “Wouldn’t that be a good thing? To condemn him as publicly as possible?”

Bucky hesitates for a moment, almost tempted to follow Wanda at the thought of taking down Alexander Pierce in public, as loudly and messily as they know how, but then he shakes his head. “I know it’s tempting,” he says. “But doing anything too publicly is dangerous,” he says. After a lifetime standing next to one of the most public figures in the kingdom, it is very difficult not to appreciate the neatness and quickness of a privately handled scandal. He waves his hand. “Too many people. Too many opinions.”

“I’m inclined to agree with Sir Barnes,” Strange says - not quite soft, but softer than he has been yet. When Wanda looks at Pietro he shrugs, and that seems to help Wanda decide; she sighs and shrugs, coming back towards Bucky.

“Where to, then?” she asks.

“The Prince’s chambers,” Bucky says. “We can wait for him.”

Wanda hesitates, but nods. “You lead the way, then,” she says, but without her purpose she’s lost some of that confidence, her figure drawn in and tense as they walk. Bucky drifts over, bumps his shoulder carefully into hers.

“It’s okay,” he says, trying his best to be reassuring. “We’ll tell Steve and his guard and they can handle it all quietly.”

“Okay,” Wanda says, and her demeanour has changed yet again, her shoulders now stiff and straight, voice curt. She is clutching Pietro’s hand so tight that her knuckles are white. It doesn’t take a genius to know what she’s worried about with every step they take.

“Wanda,” Bucky says quietly. “Steve’s not going to blame you.”

She snorts, glares up at him in an attempt to mask the hope that’s already in her eyes. “How can you -”

“I know Steve,” Bucky says. “I’ve spent too long with him not to. He won’t hold anything against you. You probably got lucky with him,” he adds thoughtfully. “If I was in his position I don’t think I’d be terribly nice to you.” Wanda emits a watery sort of snort at his words and relaxes a tiny bit. Bucky’s not sure what more he can say, so he pats her arm reassuringly and hurries their motley party up to Steve’s room as fast as he can.

As soon as he steps inside, the overwhelming feeling of returning _home_ overtakes him, and for a moment all he can do is stand and appreciate the familiar shapes of the room: the moonlight on the carpet, the shadows across the windowsill and the looming of the desk, it’s all here, all the same. He wants to touch every facet of the room all at once, but forces himself to bundle all those desperately excited emotions to the back of his mind, because if he doesn’t he’s going to vibrate to death while he waits for Steve to get back

Wanda closes the door firmly behind them and locks it again for good measure, the sound clear in the still room. Bucky and Pietro manage to sit down and stay down, but Wanda spends several minutes trying desperately to pretend that she’s not pacing across the floor and wringing her hands together. After several minutes she gives up on the pretence and paces endlessly, one end of the room to another and then back in a winding figure eight. Red ribbons of magic burst erratically out of her hands, their movements just as sharp and agitated as hers.

“Wanda,” Pietro says finally. “You’re going to give me a stomach ache.”

“I’m _sorry_ ,” Wanda moans, half-muffled as she throws herself onto the floor next to her brother and sticks her face in the carpet.

“You’ve nothing to worry about,” Strange says from the corner of the room where he’s settled, sitting cross-legged in midair. His voice is slightly too detached to be truly supportive, and sure enough Wanda doesn’t seem to find this very comforting, although she does refrain from getting back up. Pietro pats her on the back, gentle smooth strokes that do more to relax Wanda than any words could.

“The hardest part is over, I think,” he says, and switches back to his native tongue, murmuring reassurances. Wanda closes her eyes and relaxes, her face turned to one side and barely visible underneath her tangle of long dark hair.

“You could sleep,” Bucky suggests, even though he knows he has little to no change of convincing them to let their guard down so significantly. “You need it.” She’s been wound tighter than clockwork ever since the two of them had started planning. And even before that; it’s not hard to surmise that she’s been tense for a long time under Alexander Pierce.

“No,” she says, which is expected, even if her voice is thick with tiredness. Bucky shrugs at her, and she shrugs back.

~*~

None of them have a clock, or even a particularly good sense of time - three of them have been in varying forms of captivity over the last several months, and Strange maintained that the entire concept of time was irrelevant - so it’s only Bucky’s best guess that places the first noise outside Steve’s room as being around forty-five minutes after their arrival.

For a moment the four of them just hold themselves unnaturally, hopefully still, and when there’s another sound like a footstep Pietro is the one to ask, “Did you hear that?” None of them have to answer; more noise filters through the door, barely discernible shadows playing across the crack between door and floor.

Wanda straightens, her hands clenched into fists on her knees and her attention focused entirely on the door. Her hair is tangled wildly around her face.

“Get behind me,” Bucky hisses as the voices come closer - partly to protect Wanda and Pietro, but also because Wanda is looking more than a little wild and he doesn’t want whoever’s guarding Steve to attack her on sight, which seems like a more legitimate possibility each time he looks over at her. She obeys, shuffling behind him, and excitement begins to rise again, churning in his belly so forcefully he doesn’t know whether he wants to shout or be sick. He’s going to see Steve. An instant, and the door will open, and he’s going to see Steve -

The door opens, and Sam drops into a defensive position as soon as he sees Bucky. He relaxes almost immediately, but not fast enough: Steve clips his shoulder as he rushes past, heedless of his own safety as always. Bucky can’t even bring himself to care, not now, not when he has Steve rushing closer to him with absolute joy painted on his face, not when he has Steve in his arms, warm and steady and sure, the overjoyed force of him so strong that Bucky has to stagger back a step before he can return the hug.

“Are you safe?” Steve asks, his tone only growing higher and more frantic as he keeps talking, words tumbling out of his mouth so fast it’s a wonder he doesn’t choke on them. His hands clutch at Bucky’s shoulders, his waist, his hands. “Bucky, are you safe? _Bucky_ -”

“I’m safe!” Bucky exclaims, clutching right back, revelling in the familiar press of Steve’s body. “I’m safe. Steve. Get that look off your face,” he murmurs, voice dropping back down in the quiet of the room. “I’m fine, and I’ll _be_ fine, I swear. I said I’d be back, didn’t I?”

“”Sure,” Steve says, and then he blows out his breath and relaxes all at once. “Yeah, sure you did.”

Bucky’s not sure what it is, but Wanda must shift her weight or fidget or something, because suddenly he’s extremely aware of her close proximity. “It’s mostly due to Wanda,” he says, pulling away from Steve a little, gesturing to Wanda. “She got me out.”

Wanda blushes fiercely and nods at the floor.

“ _Thank you_ ,” Steve says, the most fervent Bucky’s ever seen him, and rushes over to shake Wanda’s hand. He doesn’t want to let go of Bucky, though, so Bucky ends up dragged over with him, tucked under one of Steve’s arms like he’s half the size that he is.

“It was my fault,” Wanda blurts out, in the face of Steve’s earnest thankfulness. “I turned him into a swan. I started everything -”

She cuts herself off with a slight choke and presses her lips together. To his credit, Steve’s first reaction is to turn and stare quizzically; Bucky is quite certain that he wouldn’t have the same amount of self-control.

“She did,” he confirmed, and Wanda flinches a little. “Pierce had her brother.”

“We’re twins,” Wanda blurts out again, her hands twisting nervously by her sides. “He would have killed Pietro if I didn’t follow orders, I swear it.”

“Pierce,” Sam says. “Alexander Pierce. That’s why we were keeping him at the feast,” he says, and it doesn’t really need confirmation. “And he was keeping your brother to make sure you did what he said.”

“Well, sometimes he would keep me to make Pietro do what he wanted,” Wanda says. She’s graduated from twisting her hands in her skirt to twisting her hands in each other, and her accent grows more pronounced with every word. “Pietro can run. But. Yes. I’m sorry, but I didn’t know what to do and he has so many spies and he’s so _high_ here in court -”

“It’s okay - Wanda, was it?” Steve says very gently, effectively cutting off Wanda’s increasingly frantic stream of words. “It’s - it’s more than okay, you’ve brought him back to me -”

Sam makes a small retching noise as Steve fixes Bucky with a look that is undeniably sappy.

“Oh, fuck off,” Bucky mutters fondly, and yanks Sam into the hug that has never really ended. Sam doesn’t even pretend to put up a fight, wrapping his arms around Bucky tightly.

“You were the most fucking annoying swan,” Sam says as he’s pulled in, but once they’re close he relaxes. “It’s good to see you again,” he says, his grip tight and his voice unusually unemotional.

“Likewise,” Bucky says as they pull away from each other. “Where are Nat and Clint?”

“Making sure the feast is clear and Pierce is in his quarters,” Steve says. Sam finally disentangles himself from Bucky to move to Wanda.

“It’s not your fault,” he says, and smiles almost approvingly at Wanda’s disbelieving raised eyebrows. “Maybe it is partly your fault. But when you have nowhere to go and nobody to turn to, it’s nearly impossible to get out of those situations. Your actions are understandable.”

Wanda smiles more solidly, jutting her chin out as she does. “Sorcerer Strange can help you,” she says. “James said you could handle this quietly. Quickly.”

“We can,” Steve agrees, and even as he goes over to greet the still-floating Strange Bucky can see the gears in his head turning.

“We can do this now, then,” Sam says. “Call the council now.”

“Before Pierce can realise anything’s wrong,” Bucky agrees.

Steve nods once and then again, more decisively. “I - alright. Yes. You’re right. Sam, Sorcerer Strange, if you could come with me?”

~*~

This time Bucky is the one to pace up and down the room, expecting and dreading Pierce’s arrival at any moment. He doesn’t know what he’ll say, doesn’t know what he’ll do to the man who was responsible for turning him into a _swan_ -

The door clicks clicks open and he whirls to face it, but it’s Clint who greets him. “C’mon,” he says, beckoning. “We need you guys in the council room.”

“You mean they met without us?” Bucky tries not to yelp. Clint nods a little sheepishly.

“Steve sent me to grab you when he started heading down to the council room. If we hurry we can probably catch them,” he says helpfully as he drags the three of them through the halls.

“That asshole,” Bucky says grudgingly. Steve knows him too well, knows that the last thing he wants to do is face Pierce. “He knows how far his rooms are from the council room.”

Sure enough, by the time they get to the council room, red-faced and slightly out of breath, the meeting is wrapping up.

“Is this some kind of joke?” they hear as they come down the corridor; the door has been left open, either carelessly or in anticipation of their arrival. “Because if it is, I’m warning you, I won’t find it very funny.”

“This is no joke,” Steve says, and the way he sounds - Bucky has never heard him this cold, this unflinching.

There are a few audible gasps when Bucky follows Clint into the room. Pierce is ashen, and Wanda gives him the most vindictive glare Bucky has ever seen.

He’s spent too long thinking about what he would say to the man who had done this to him, what he would do, and in the end all he does is stand and stare as Pierce is led out by Sorcerer Strange, his head turning slowly to keep the man in his vision until the door slips shut behind him, and Bucky lets out a long breath he hadn’t even realised he’d been holding.

Steve touches his arm gently, and it’s only because Bucky knows that touch so intimately that he doesn’t jump at it. “He’s being taken to the Sanctum Sanctorum to be stripped of his amulets and charms,” he says lowly. “I don’t know yet what will happen to him past that, but he won’t come back, Bucky, I can promise you that.” His intensity doesn’t change as he turns to Wanda and Pietro. Thank you,” he repeats. “I want you to know you and Pietro will always have a place here, if you want it.”

Wanda nods, her eyes wide and growing shiny. When she tuckers her hands behind her back again, her skirt trembles a little.

“It’s late,” Natasha says kindly. “We’ll show you where you can sleep.”

There’s a gentle noise from behind them, a polite clearing of the throat, but Steve ignores it utterly, taking Bucky’s arm. “Come,” he says gently, and Bucky does.

The light in Steve’s eyes is only more beautiful in the night, in the quiet of the corridor. “I almost can’t believe it,” he murmurs. “You’re here. You’re safe?”

“I’m here and I’m safe,” Bucky repeats, on a breath that is almost a laugh. “Thanks to you.”

“The way Wanda told it, you had something to do with it as well,” Steve says, drifting closer as they walk. Bucky barely even realises he’s matching Steve until he’s abruptly a step closer, as well, Steve’s face looming large in the corner of his eye. 

“I missed you,” Bucky says, low, and that has Steve bridging the rest of the gap between them, so that they’re pressed together as the re-enter his quarters, shoulder to shoulder, ribs pressed close.

“I missed you too,” Steve breathes, right into Bucky’s ear as the two of them stop walking. Bucky turns his head, presses a quick kiss to Steve’s neck and feels him shiver; briefly contemplates the thought of pushing further, but neither of them need that tonight. Neither of them are moving from their positions. What Bucky needs tonight is to be close to Steve, is all.

“Come to bed,” Steve says, and Bucky can _feel_ the way he blushes. “I mean, to sleep. Actually sleep. I don’t think I could handle you sleeping in the alcove tonight.”

“No,” Bucky agrees, and Steve, bless him, understands, doesn’t need another word from him. He tugs the two of them over to the bed and falls into it, pulling Bucky down to huddle into him.

“Don’t you dare go anywhere,” Steve murmurs.

Bucky just smiles. “No,” he says, his hand smoothing across Steve’s back, the warm expanse of skin. “‘M not going anywhere.”

~*~

Bucky wakes up suddenly the next morning: his eyes fly open and he grabs at the snoring lump in front of him, as though to make sure Steve’s still there.

Steve is sleeping peacefully, sprawled out beside Bucky with weak sunlight barely creeping through the window to fall on his chest. One of his arms is slung comfortably over Bucky’s hip, which - Bucky has told him a thousand times not to do that, that it would interfere with getting out of bed quickly if the need to do that ever arose, and Steve only ever retaliated by claiming that what he did while he was sleeping was out of his control. Bucky lets out his breath in a long, slow exhale, and watches the comfortable rise and fall of Steve’s chest with something warm in his chest.

He doesn’t quite fall asleep, but he does doze off until he’s only slightly, vaguely aware of his surroundings, and of course that’s the time that Steve decides to wake up.

“Hmm,” he says, and his smile is audible even before he leans forward and Bucky feels the curve of it nuzzle against his temple.

“Morning,” Bucky murmurs, because neither of them stand a chance at fooling the other that they’re still asleep, not after all these years.

“Buck,” Steve says, utter contentment in his tone. Bucky hums, lets his eyes fall closed again and tries to focus completely on the sensation of Steve so near him, of Steve’s smile against his skin.

“Steve,” he croons.

“Buck,” Steve says again. “I don’t want you to be my First Knight anymore.”

Bucky blinks. Then he tilts his head up to look at Steve, who is dreadfully, earnestly serious. “Well now,” Bucky says. “That’s a way to wake a guy up.”

“I’m sorry,” Steve says. His hand slides down to grab Bucky’s hand, and Bucky contemplates pulling away before succumbing to Steve’s horribly well-meaning face. “Truly I am. But you - this - it was all because of me,” he says desperately. “Because you were guarding me. Buck, I couldn’t stand it if it happened again.”

“Well -”

“And _don’t you dare_ say better you than me,” Steve says, glaring. “It’s _not_. I won’t stand for it.”

“Oh, won’t you,” Bucky mutters in an attempt to cover up the fact that he’d certainly been about to say that. Steve knows him too well, is the problem.

Steve stares at him, gripping his hand tight, and Bucky abruptly comes to a decision. “What the hell,” he says. “Okay.”

Steve’s mouth falls open; for a moment he doesn’t look like he can talk. “Okay?” he squeaks out eventually before regaining control of himself. “I mean, okay. Yes. Good. That’s...good.” There’s hurt in his eyes; he hadn’t expected Bucky to acquiesce, not so easily.

“I can’t be a First Knight and court you, after all,” Bucky says. That has Steve freezing once again, halfway across the mattress with his eyes wide as he slowly turns to face Bucky. “If you’ll let me, of course,” Bucky says, reaching out tentatively. Their kingdom is exceedingly small but it’s stable, and quite frankly the last thing that Bucky cares about right now is politics. 

“I -” Steve manages brokenly.

“You know what I woke up thinking about this morning?” Bucky asks, and continues without letting Steve answer. “How good you looked asleep like that, and how much I couldn’t want your arm over my waist because it might get in my way if I need to get out of the bed quickly.” Steve blinks hard, squeezes Bucky’s hand. Bucky dares to lift it into a kiss. “I want your hands on me,” he says quietly. “I want to touch you without worrying about being your knight at the same time.”

“You asshole,” Steve says, eyes shiny and voice wobbly. “Consort is even more dangerous than First Knight.”

Bucky grins, kisses the hand he’s holding once more. “You’re worth it, Steve.”

Steve tries to bite back a sigh for a moment and then stops trying, rolling onto his back as he lets out all his breath in a gusty noise. “You’re such an asshole,” he says eventually. “I can’t even be mad at you.”

“Get used to it,” Bucky says smugly. Steve groans and tries to scowl, but when Bucky turns his head it’s obvious that Steve can’t keep his smile off his face, which somewhat derails the effect of his otherwise foreboding frown - never mind the fact that Bucky hasn’t been intimidated by that frown since he was ten years old.

“We’re training more knights,” Steve says stubbornly. “We can let them closer and more often. In the castle, even. Instead of just expecting the First Knight to do it all.”

“And all it took for you to start taking care of yourself properly was my kidnapping,” Bucky murmurs. Steve purses his lips.

“Don’t,” he murmurs. “Don’t joke about it. You - it scared the life outta me, Bucky Barnes.”

“So you’ll keep me safe and not yourself,” Bucky says flatly, turning his head away. He can’t quite explain why he’s pushing on this so hard, except for how the mood has soured slightly, and the fact that he can’t stop thinking about how it would have been if Steve had been the one to disappear.

Steve’s hand creeps back across the bed, and somehow, in the way that he grasps - it almost makes everything fine again. It would, if Bucky hadn’t had years to build up an immunity to Steve’s ridiculous charms.

“Are you angry at me?” Steve asks, voice small. Bucky blinks at the ceiling.

“Why on earth would I be angry at you?”

“I couldn’t - I didn’t protect you,” Steve says, and that is unbelievable enough to have Bucky rolling onto his side to face his idiot of a Steve.

“Whose job is it to protect whom, now?” he asks pointedly. Steve averts his eyes, even inches away slightly.

“I know,” he says. “I just -” He trails off and sighs helplessly.

“I’m _angry_ ,” Bucky says finally, “because I can’t stop thinking about the absolute nervous wreck I would turn into if it’d been you who disappeared.”

“We’ll take better precautions,” Steve says, and ruins it slightly by adding stubbornly, “Not more. Just better. Smarter. Magic is growing more prevalent in the city, so we need to bring it into our system of guard.”

Bucky stares for long enough that Steve starts to shift uncomfortably, but he sticks to his guns. Finally, Bucky slides forward and rests his forehead against Steve’s neck. “I know that’s the best I’m gonna get from you,” he mutters, “but it doesn’t really feel like a win.”

Even with his face in Steve’s neck, he can still feel the other man’s smug, wide grin. “Better get used to it, Buck,” Steve says, so satisfied that Bucky can’t help but laugh and press closer and kiss the words off his lips. A thought unfurls in his mind slowly, luxuriously: he’s going to be allowed to do this, often and soon, and he can’t help the way that a smile curls at his mouth at the thought. He can’t wait.


End file.
